Metastability range of the Bose condensate in 7Li-fermion mixtures at T = 0

We evaluate the ground state of a mixture of bosons and spin-polarized fermions in the case of attractive boson-boson interactions, using a variational Ansatz for the Bose condensate wave function and the Thomas-Fermi approximation for the fermions in the mean field of the condensate. Within this approximation we show that the presence of the fermions tends to restrict the metastability range of the condensate, irrespectively of the sign of the boson-fermion interactions. Numerical illustrations are reported for mixtures of ⁷Li atoms with fermions having the ⁶Li mass.