No Arabic abstract
We calculate the one-body temperature Greens (Matsubara) function of the unitary Fermi gas via Quantum Monte Carlo, and extract the spectral weight function $A(p,omega)$ using the methods of maximum entropy and singular value decomposition. From $A(p,omega)$ we determine the quasiparticle spectrum, which can be accurately parametrized by three functions of temperature: an effective mass $m^*$, a mean-field potential $U$, and a gap $Delta$. Below the critical temperature $T_c=0.15varepsilon_F$ the results for $m^*$, $U$ and $Delta$ can be accurately reproduced using an independent quasiparticle model. We find evidence of a pseudogap in the fermionic excitation spectrum for temperatures up to {$T^*approx 0.20varepsilon_{F} > T_c$}.
A unitary Fermi gas has a surprisingly rich spectrum of large amplitude modes of the pairing field alone, which defies a description within a formalism involving only a reduced set of degrees of freedom, such as quantum hydrodynamics or a Landau-Ginzburg-like description. These modes are very slow, with oscillation frequencies well below the pairing gap, which makes their damping through quasiparticle excitations quite ineffective. In atomic traps these modes couple naturally with the density oscillations, and the corresponding oscillations of the atomic cloud are an example of a new type of collective mode in superfluid Fermi systems. They have lower frequencies than the compressional collective hydrodynamic oscillations, have a non-spherical momentum distribution, and could be excited by a quick time variation of the scattering length.
The Quantum Monte Carlo method for spin 1/2 fermions at finite temperature is formulated for dilute systems with an s-wave interaction. The motivation and the formalism are discussed along with descriptions of the algorithm and various numerical issues. We report on results for the energy, entropy and chemical potential as a function of temperature. We give upper bounds on the critical temperature T_c for the onset of superfluidity, obtained by studying the finite size scaling of the condensate fraction. All of these quantities were computed for couplings around the unitary regime in the range -0.5 le (k_F a)^{-1} le 0.2, where a is the s-wave scattering length and k_F is the Fermi momentum of a non-interacting gas at the same density. In all cases our data is consistent with normal Fermi gas behavior above a characteristic temperature T_0 > T_c, which depends on the coupling and is obtained by studying the deviation of the caloric curve from that of a free Fermi gas. For T_c < T < T_0 we find deviations from normal Fermi gas behavior that can be attributed to pairing effects. Low temperature results for the energy and the pairing gap are shown and compared with Green Function Monte Carlo results by other groups.
Quantized vortices carry the angular momentum in rotating superfluids, and are key to the phenomenon of quantum turbulence. Advances in ultra-cold atom technology enable quantum turbulence to be studied in regimes with both experimental and theoretical control, unlike the original contexts of superfluid helium experiments. While much work has been performed with bosonic systems, detailed studies of fermionic quantum turbulence are nascent, despite wide applicability to other contexts such as rotating neutron stars. In this paper, we present the first large-scale study of quantum turbulence in rotating fermionic superfluids using an accurate orbital based time-dependent density functional theory (DFT) called the superfluid local density approximation (SLDA). We identify two different modes of turbulent decay in the dynamical equilibration of a rotating fermionic superfluid, and contrast these results with a computationally simpler orbital-free DFT, which we find can qualitatively reproduce these decay mechanisms if dissipation is explicitly included. These results demonstrate that one-body dissipation mechanisms intrinsic to fermionic superfluids play a key role differentiating fermionic from bosonic turbulence, but also suggest that simpler orbital-free theories may be corrected so that these more efficient techniques can be used to model extended physical systems such as neutron superfluids in neutron stars.
Thermodynamic properties of an ultracold Fermi gas in a harmonic trap are calculated within a local density approximation, using a conserving many-body formalism for the BCS to BEC crossover problem, which has been developed by Haussmann et al. [Phys. Rev. A 75, 023610 (2007)]. We focus on the unitary regime near a Feshbach resonance and determine the local density and entropy profiles and the global entropy S(E) as a function of the total energy E. Our results are in good agreement with both experimental data and previous analytical and numerical results for the thermodynamics of the unitary Fermi gas. The value of the Bertsch parameter at T=0 and the superfluid transition temperature, however, differ appreciably. We show that, well in the superfluid regime, removal of atoms near the cloud edge enables cooling far below temperatures that have been reached so far.
We analyze the problem of eliminating finite-size errors from quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) energy data. We demonstrate that both (i) adding a recently proposed [S. Chiesa et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 076404 (2006)] finite-size correction to the Ewald energy and (ii) using the model periodic Coulomb (MPC) interaction [L. M. Fraser et al., Phys. Rev. B 53, 1814 (1996); P. R. C. Kent et al., Phys. Rev. B 59, 1917 (1999); A. J. Williamson et al., Phys. Rev. B 55, 4851 (1997)] are good solutions to the problem of removing finite-size effects from the interaction energy in cubic systems, provided the exchange-correlation (XC) hole has converged with respect to system size. However, we find that the MPC interaction distorts the XC hole in finite systems, implying that the Ewald interaction should be used to generate the configuration distribution. The finite-size correction of Chiesa et al. is shown to be incomplete in systems of low symmetry. Beyond-leading-order corrections to the kinetic energy are found to be necessary at intermediate and high densities, and we investigate the effect of adding such corrections to QMC data for the homogeneous electron gas. We analyze finite-size errors in two-dimensional systems and show that the leading-order behavior differs from that which has hitherto been supposed. We compare the efficiency of different twist-averaging methods for reducing single-particle finite-size errors and we examine the performance of various finite-size extrapolation formulas. Finally, we investigate the system-size scaling of biases in diffusion QMC.