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We investigate the zero-temperature ferromagnetic behavior of a two-component repulsive Fermi gas in the presence of a correlated random field that represents an optical speckle pattern. The density is tuned so that the (noninteracting) Fermi energy is close to the mobility edge of the Anderson localization transition. We employ quantum Monte Carlo simulations to determine various ground-state properties, including the equation of state, the magnetic susceptibility, and the energy of an impurity immersed in a polarized Fermi gas (repulsive polaron). In the weakly interacting limit, the magnetic susceptibility is found to be suppressed by disorder. However, it rapidly increases with the interaction strength, and it diverges at a much weaker interaction strength compared to the clean gas. Both the transition from the paramagnetic phase to the partially ferromagnetic phase, and the one from the partially to the fully ferromagnetic phase are strongly favored by disorder, indicating a case of order induced by disorder., Comment: 5+1 pages, 5 figures

We consider a Bose-Fermi mixture in the molecular limit of the attractive interaction between fermions and bosons. For a boson density smaller or equal to the fermion density, we show analytically how a T-matrix approach for the constituent bosons and fermions recovers the expected physical limit of a Fermi-Fermi mixture of molecules and atoms. In this limit, we derive simple expressions for the self-energies, the momentum distribution function, and the chemical potentials. By extending these equations to a trapped system, we determine how to tailor the experimental parameters of a Bose-Fermi mixture in order to enhance the 'indirect Pauli exclusion effect' on the boson momentum distribution function. For the homogeneous system, we present finally a Diffusion Monte Carlo simulation which confirms the occurrence of such a peculiar effect., Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures; final version

We study a resonant Bose-Fermi mixture at zero temperature by using the fixed-node diffusion Monte Carlo method. We explore the system from weak to strong boson-fermion interaction, for different concentrations of the bosons relative to the fermion component. We focus on the case where the boson density $n_B$ is smaller than the fermion density $n_F$, for which a first-order quantum phase transition is found from a state with condensed bosons immersed in a Fermi sea, to a Fermi-Fermi mixture of composite fermions and unpaired fermions. We obtain the equation of state and the phase diagram, and we find that the region of phase separation shrinks to zero for vanishing $n_B$., Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, published version

We consider a homogeneous Bose-Fermi mixture, with the boson-fermion interaction tuned by a Fano-Feshbach resonance, in the presence of mass and density imbalance between the two species. By using many-body diagrammatic methods, we first study the finite-temperature phase diagram for the specific case of the mass-imbalanced mixture $^{87}$Rb $-^{40}$K for different values of the density imbalance. We then analyse the quantum phase transition associated with the disappearance at zero temperature of the boson condensate above a critical boson-fermion coupling. We find a pronounced dependence of the critical coupling on the mass ratio and a weak dependence on the density imbalance. For a vanishingly small boson density, we derive, within our approximation, the asymptotic expressions for the critical coupling in the limits of small and large mass ratios. These expressions are relevant also for the polaron-molecule transition in a Fermi mixture at small and large mass ratios. The analysis of the momentum distribution functions at sufficiently large density imbalances shows an interesting effect in the bosonic momentum distribution due to the simultaneous presence of composite fermions and unpaired fermions., Comment: Final version