Collapse of a degenerate Fermi gas

Science. 2002 Sep 27;297(5590):2240-3. doi: 10.1126/science.1077386. Epub 2002 Aug 29.

Abstract

A degenerate gas of identical fermions is brought to collapse by the interaction with a Bose-Einstein condensate. We used an atomic mixture of fermionic potassium-40 and bosonic rubidium-87, in which the strong interspecies attraction leads to an instability above a critical number of particles. The observed phenomenon suggests a direction for manipulating fermion-fermion interactions on the route to superfluidity.