We study a confined mixture of bosons and fermions in the regime of quantal
degeneracy, with particular attention to the effects of the interactions on the
kinetic energy of the fermionic component. We are able to explore a wide region
of system parameters by identifying two scaling variables which completely
determine its state at low temperature. These are the ratio of the
boson-fermion and boson-boson interaction strengths and the ratio of the radii
of the two clouds. We find that the effect of the interactions can be sizeable
for reasonable choices of the parameters and that its experimental study can be
used to infer the sign of the boson-fermion scattering length. The interplay
between interactions and thermal effects in the fermionic kinetic energy is
also discussed.Comment: REVTEX, 8 pages, 6 figures included. Small corrections to text and
figures, accepted for publication in EPJ
