A Dual-Species Bose-Einstein Condensate with Attractive Interspecies Interactions

We report on the production of a 41K-87Rb dual-species Bose–Einstein condensate with tunable interspecies interaction and we study the mixture in the attractive regime; i.e., for negative values of the interspecies scattering length a12. The binary condensate is prepared in the ground state and confined in a pure optical trap. We exploit Feshbach resonances for tuning the value of a12. After compensating the gravitational sag between the two species with a magnetic field gradient, we drive the mixture into the attractive regime. We let the system evolve both in free space and in an optical waveguide. In both geometries, for strong attractive interactions, we observe the formation of self-bound states, recognizable as quantum droplets. Our findings prove that robust, long-lived droplet states can be realized in attractive two-species mixtures, despite the two atomic components possibly experiencing different potentials.