Quantum droplets in a dipolar Bose gas at a dimensional crossover

Abstract

We study the beyond-mean-field corrections to the energy of a dipolar Bose gas confined to two dimensions by a box potential with dipoles oriented in plane such that their interaction is anisotropic in the two unconfined dimensions. At a critical strength of the dipolar interaction the system becomes unstable on the mean field level. We find that the ground state of the gas is strongly influenced by the corrections, leading to formation of a self-bound droplet, in analogy to the free space case. Properties of the droplet state can be found by minimizing the extended Gross–Pitaevskii energy functional. In the limit of strong confinement we show analytically that the correction can be interpreted as an effective three-body repulsion which stabilizes the gas at finite density.