Collisions of self-bound quantum droplets

Abstract

We report on the study of binary collisions between quantum droplets formed by an attractive mixture of ultracold atoms. We distinguish two main outcomes of the collision, i.e. merging and separation, depending on the velocity of the colliding pair. The critical velocity $v_c$ that discriminates between the two cases displays a different dependence on the atom number $N$ for small and large droplets. By comparing our experimental results with numerical simulations, we show that the non-monotonic behavior of $v_c(N)$ is due to the crossover from a compressible to an incompressible regime, where the collisional dynamics is governed by different energy scales, i.e. the droplet binding energy and the surface tension. These results also provide the first evidence of the liquid-like nature of quantum droplets in the large $N$ limit, where their behavior closely resembles that of classical liquid droplets.

References in corpus (7)

• Quantum liquid droplets in a mixture of Bose-Einstein condensates
• Self-bound droplets of a dilute magnetic quantum liquid
• Quantum-fluctuation-driven crossover from a dilute Bose-Einstein condensate to a macro-droplet in a dipolar quantum fluid
• Collisions of matter-wave solitons
• Deviation from one-dimensionality in stationary properties and collisional dynamics of matter-wave solitons
• Droplets of trapped quantum dipolar bosons
• Liquid quantum droplets of ultracold magnetic atoms

Cited by in corpus (29)

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• Suppression of the quasi-two-dimensional quantum collapse in the attraction field by the Lee-Huang-Yang effect
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• Microscopic derivation of the extended Gross-Pitaevskii equation for quantum droplets in binary Bose mixtures
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