No Arabic abstract
In a recent article, Yefsah et al. [Nature 499, 426 (2013)] report the observation of an unusual excitation in an elongated harmonically trapped unitary Fermi gas. After phase imprinting a domain wall, they observe oscillations almost an order of magnitude slower than predicted by any theory of domain walls which they interpret as a heavy soliton of inertial mass some 200 times larger than the free fermion mass or 50 times larger than expected for a domain wall. We present compelling evidence that this soliton is instead a quantized vortex ring by showing that the main aspects of the experiment can be naturally explained within the framework of time-dependent superfluid DFT.
The splitting instability of a doubly-quantized vortex in the BEC-BCS crossover of a superfluid Fermi gas is investigated by means of a low-energy effective field theory. Our linear stability analysis and non-equilibrium numerical simulations reveal that the character of the instability drastically changes across the crossover. In the BEC-limit, the splitting of the vortex into two singly-quantized vortices occurs through the emission of phonons, while such an emission is completely absent in the BCS-limit. In the crossover-regime, the instability and phonon emission are enhanced, and the lifetime of a doubly-quantized vortex becomes minimal. The emitted phonon is amplified due to the rotational superradiance and can be observed as a spiraling pattern in the superfluid. We also investigate the influence of temperature, population imbalance, and three-dimensional effects.
We present results from Monte Carlo calculations investigating the properties of the homogeneous, spin-balanced unitary Fermi gas in three dimensions. The temperature is varied across the superfluid transition allowing us to determine the temperature dependence of the chemical potential, the energy per particle and the contact density. Numerical artifacts due to finite volume and discretization are systematically studied, estimated, and reduced.
The unitary Fermi gas (UFG) offers an unique opportunity to study quantum turbulence both experimentally and theoretically in a strongly interacting fermionic superfluid. It yields to accurate and controlled experiments, and admits the only dynamical microscopic description via time-dependent density functional theory (DFT) - apart from dilute bosonic gases - of the crossing and reconnection of superfluid vortex lines conjectured by Feynman in 1955 to be at the origin of quantum turbulence in superfluids at zero temperature. We demonstrate how various vortex configurations can be generated by using well established experimental techniques: laser stirring and phase imprinting. New imagining techniques demonstrated by the MIT group [Ku et al. arXiv:1402.7052] should be able to directly visualize these crossings and reconnections in greater detail than performed so far in liquid helium. We demonstrate the critical role played by the geometry of the trap in the formation and dynamics of a vortex in the UFG and how laser stirring and phase imprint can be used to create vortex tangles with clear signatures of the onset of quantum turbulence.
The unitary Fermi gas is a many-body system of two-component fermions with zero-range interactions tuned to infinite scattering length. Despite much activity and interest in unitary Fermi gases and its universal properties, there have been great difficulties in performing accurate calculations of the superfluid condensate fraction and pairing wave function. In this work we present auxiliary-field lattice Monte Carlo simulations using a novel lattice interaction which accelerates the approach to the continuum limit, thereby allowing for robust calculations of these difficult observables. As a benchmark test we compute the ground state energy of 33 spin-up and 33 spin-down particles. As a fraction of the free Fermi gas energy $E_{FG}$, we find $E_0/E_{FG}= 0.369(2), 0.372(2)$, using two different definitions of the finite-system energy ratio, in agreement with the latest theoretical and experimental results. We then determine the condensate fraction by measuring off-diagonal long-range order in the two-body density matrix. We find that the fraction of condensed pairs is $alpha = 0.43(2)$. We also extract the pairing wave function and find the pair correlation length to be $zeta_pk_F = 1.8(3) hbar$, where $k_F$ is the Fermi momentum. Provided that the simulations can be performed without severe sign oscillations, the methods we present here can be applied to superfluid neutron matter as well as more exotic P-wave and D-wave superfluids.
Artificial gauge fields are versatile tools that allow to influence the dynamics of ultracold atoms in Bose-Einstein condensates. Here we discuss a method of artificial gauge field generation stemming from the evanescent fields of the curved surface of an optical nanofibre. The exponential decay of the evanescent fields leads to large gradients in the generalized Rabi frequency and therefore to the presence of geometric vector and scalar potentials. By solving the Gross-Pitaevskii equation in the presence of the artificial gauge fields originating from the fundamental HE$_{11}$ mode of the fibre, we show that vortex rings can be created in a controlled manner. We also calculate the magnetic fields resulting from the higher order HE$_{21}$, TE$_{01}$, and TM$_{01}$ modes and compare them to the fundamental HE$_{11}$ mode.