No Arabic abstract
A single down spin Fermion with an attractive, zero range interaction with a Fermi sea of up-spin Fermions forms a polaronic quasiparticle. The associated quasiparticle weight vanishes beyond a critical strength of the attractive interaction, where a many-body bound state is formed. From a variational wavefunction in the molecular limit, we determine the critical value for the polaron to molecule transition. The value agrees well with the diagrammatic Monte Carlo results of Prokofev and Svistunov and is consistent with recent rf-spectroscopy measurements of the quasiparticle weight by Schirotzek et. al. In addition, we calculate the contact coefficient of the strongly imbalanced gas, using the adiabatic theorem of Tan and discuss the implications of the polaron to molecule transition for the phase diagram of the attractive Fermi gas at finite imbalance.
We consider the highly spin-imbalanced limit of a two-component Fermi gas, where there is a small density of $downarrow$ impurities attractively interacting with a sea of $uparrow$ fermions. In the single-impurity limit at zero temperature, there exists the so-called polaron-molecule transition, where the impurity sharply changes its character by binding a $uparrow$ fermion at sufficiently strong attraction. Using a recently developed variational approach, we calculate the thermodynamic properties of the impurity, and we show that the transition becomes a smooth crossover at finite temperature due to the thermal occupation of excited states in the impurity spectral function. However, remnants of the single-impurity transition are apparent in the momentum-resolved spectral function, which can in principle be probed with Raman spectroscopy. We furthermore show that the Tan contact exhibits a characteristic non-monotonic dependence on temperature that provides a signature of the zero-temperature polaron-molecule transition. For a finite impurity density, we argue that descriptions purely based on the behavior of the Fermi polaron are invalid near the polaron-molecule transition, since correlations between impurities cannot be ignored. In particular, we show that the spin-imbalanced system undergoes phase separation at low temperatures due to the strong attraction between $uparrowdownarrow$ molecules induced by the Fermi sea. Thus, we find that the impurity spectrum and the induced impurity-impurity interactions are key to understanding the phase diagram of the spin-imbalanced Fermi gas.
We model the one-dimension (1D) to three-dimension (3D) crossover in a cylindrically trapped Fermi gas with attractive interactions and spin-imbalance. We calculate the mean-field phase diagram, and study the relative stability of exotic superfluid phases as a function of interaction strength and temperature. For weak interactions and low density, we find 1D-like behavior, which repeats as a function of the chemical potential as new channels open. For strong interactions, mixing of single-particle levels gives 3D-like behavior at all densities. Furthermore, we map the system to an effective 1D model, finding significant density dependence of the effective 1D scattering length.
Transport of strongly interacting fermions governs modern materials -- from the high-$T_c$ cuprates to bilayer graphene --, but also nuclear fission, the merging of neutron stars and the expansion of the early universe. Here we observe a universal quantum limit of diffusivity in a homogeneous, strongly interacting Fermi gas of atoms by studying sound propagation and its attenuation via the coupled transport of momentum and heat. In the normal state, the sound diffusivity ${D}$ monotonically decreases upon lowering the temperature $T$, in contrast to the diverging behavior of weakly interacting Fermi liquids. As the superfluid transition temperature is crossed, ${D}$ attains a universal value set by the ratio of Plancks constant ${h}$ and the particle mass ${m}$. This finding of quantum limited sound diffusivity informs theories of fermion transport, with relevance for hydrodynamic flow of electrons, neutrons and quarks.
We study the spin-Seebeck effect in a strongly interacting, two-component Fermi gas and propose an experiment to measure this effect by relatively displacing spin up and spin down atomic clouds in a trap using spin-dependent temperature gradients. We compute the spin-Seebeck coefficient and related spin-heat transport coefficients as functions of temperature and interaction strength. We find that when the inter-spin scattering length becomes larger than the Fermi wavelength, the spin-Seebeck coefficient changes sign as a function of temperature, and hence so does the direction of the spin-separation. We compute this zero-crossing temperature as a function of interaction strength and in particular in the unitary limit for the inter-spin scattering.
Ultracold atomic Fermi gases present an opportunity to study strongly interacting Fermi systems in a controlled and uncomplicated setting. The ability to tune attractive interactions has led to the discovery of superfluidity in these systems with an extremely high transition temperature, near T/T_F = 0.2. This superfluidity is the electrically neutral analog of superconductivity; however, superfluidity in atomic Fermi gases occurs in the limit of strong interactions and defies a conventional BCS description. For these strong interactions, it is predicted that the onset of pairing and superfluidity can occur at different temperatures. This gives rise to a pseudogap region where, for a range of temperatures, the system retains some of the characteristics of the superfluid phase, such as a BCS-like dispersion and a partially gapped density of states, but does not exhibit superfluidity. By making two independent measurements: the direct observation of pair condensation in momentum space and a measurement of the single-particle spectral function using an analog to photoemission spectroscopy, we directly probe the pseudogap phase. Our measurements reveal a BCS-like dispersion with back-bending near the Fermi wave vector k_F that persists well above the transition temperature for pair condensation.