Prospect of creating a composite Fermi-Bose superfluid

We show that composite Fermi-Bose superfluids can be created in cold-atom traps by employing a Feshbach resonance or coherent photoassociation. The bosonic molecular condensate created in this way implies a new fermion pairing mechanism associated with the exchange of fermion pairs between the molecular condensate and an atomic fermion superfluid. We predict macroscopically coherent, Josephson-Like oscillations of the atomic and molecular populations in response to a sudden change of the molecular energy, and suggest that these oscillations will provide an experimental signature of the pairing. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.