We report the experimental measurement of the equation of state of a two-dimensional Fermi gas with attractive s-wave interactions throughout the crossover from a weakly coupled Fermi gas to a Bose gas of tightly bound dimers as the interaction strength is varied. We demonstrate that interactions lead to a renormalization of the density of the Fermi gas by several orders of magnitude. We compare our data near the ground state and at finite temperature to predictions for both fermions and bosons from Quantum Monte Carlo simulations and Luttinger-Ward theory. Our results serve as input for investigations of close-to-equilibrium dynamics and transport in the two-dimensional system.
We investigate a two-component Fermi gas with unequal spin populations along the BCS-BEC crossover. By using the extended BCS equations and the concept of off-diagonal-long-range-order we derive a formula for the condensate number of Cooper pairs as a function of energy gap, average chemical potential, imbalance chemical potential and temperature. Then we study the zero-temperature condensate fraction of Cooper pairs by varying interaction strength and polarization, finding a depletion of the condensate fraction by increasing the population imbalance. We also consider explicitly the presence of an external harmonic confinement and we study, within the local-density approximation, the phase separation between superfluid and normal phase regions of the polarized fermionic cloud. In particular, we calculate both condensate density profiles and total density profiles from the inner superfluid core to the normal region passing for the interface, where a finite jump in the density is a clear manifestation of this phase-separated regime. Finally, we compare our theoretical results with the available experimental data on the condensate fraction of polarized 6Li atoms [Science 311, 492 (2006)]. These experimental data are in reasonable agreement with our predictions in a suitable range of polarizations, but only in the BCS side of the crossover up to unitarity.
We determine the size of the critical region of the superfluid transition in the BCS-BEC crossover of a three-dimensional fermion gas, using a renormalization-group approach to a bosonic theory of pairing fluctuations. For the unitary Fermi gas, we find a sizable critical region $[T_G^-,T_G^+]$, of order $T_c$, around the transition temperature $T_c$ with a pronounced asymmetry: $|T_G^+-T_c|/|T_G^--T_c|sim8$. The critical region is strongly suppressed on the BCS side of the crossover but remains important on the BEC side.
We investigate the macroscopic quantum tunneling of fermionic superfluids in the two-dimensional BCS-BEC crossover by using an effective tunneling energy which explicitly depends on the condensate fraction and the chemical potential of the system. We compare the mean-field effective tunneling energy with the beyond-mean-field one finding that the mean-field tunneling energy is not reliable in the BEC regime of the crossover. Then we solve the Josephson equations of the population imbalance and the relative phase calculating the frequency of tunneling oscillation both in the linear regime and in the nonlinear one. Our results show that the Josephson frequency is larger in the intermediate regime of the BCS-BEC crossover due to the peculiar behavior of the effective tunneling energy in the crossover.
Strongly correlated Fermi systems with pairing interactions become superfluid below a critical temperature $T_c$. The extent to which such pairing correlations alter the behavior of the liquid at temperatures $T > T_c$ is a subtle issue that remains an area of debate, in particular regarding the appearance of the so-called pseudogap in the BCS-BEC crossover of unpolarized spin-$1/2$ nonrelativistic matter. To shed light on this, we extract several quantities of crucial importance at and around the unitary limit, namely: the odd-even staggering of the total energy, the spin susceptibility, the pairing correlation function, the condensate fraction, and the critical temperature $T_c$, using a non-perturbative, constrained-ensemble quantum Monte Carlo algorithm.
The crossover between low and high density regimes of exciton-polariton condensates is examined using a BCS wavefunction approach. Our approach is an extension of the BEC-BCS crossover theory for excitons, but includes a cavity photon field. The approach can describe both the low density limit, where the system can be described as a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of exciton-polaritons, and the high density limit, where the system enters a photon dominated regime. In contrast to the exciton BEC-BCS crossover where the system approaches an electron-hole plasma, the polariton high density limit has strongly correlated electron-hole pairs. At intermediate densities, there is a regime with BCS-like properties, with a peak at non-zero momentum of the singlet pair function. We calculate the expected photoluminescence and give several experimental signatures of the crossover.