Quantum filaments in dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates

Collapse in dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates may be arrested by quantum fluctuations. Due to the anisotropy of the dipole-dipole interactions, the dipole-driven collapse induced by soft excitations is compensated by the repulsive Lee-Huang-Yang contribution resulting from quantum fluctuations of hard excitations, in a similar mechanism as that recently proposed for Bose-Bose mixtures. The arrested collapse results in self-bound filamentlike droplets, providing an explanation for the intriguing results of recent dysprosium experiments. Arrested instability and droplet formation are general features directly linked to the nature of the dipole-dipole interactions, and should hence play an important role in all future experiments with strongly dipolar gases.