No Arabic abstract
We study the interactions among phonons and the phonon lifetime in a pair-condensed Fermi gas in the BEC-BCS crossover in the collisionless regime. To compute the phonon-phonon coupling amplitudes we use a microscopic model based on a generalized BCS Ansatz including moving pairs, which allows for a systematic expansion around the mean field BCS approximation of the ground state. We show that the quantum hydrodynamic expression of the amplitudes obtained by Landau and Khalatnikov apply only on the energy shell, that is for resonant processes that conserve energy. The microscopic model yields the same excitation spectrum as the Random Phase Approximation, with a linear (phononic) start and a concavity at low wave number that changes from upwards to downwards in the BEC-BCS crossover. When the concavity of the dispersion relation is upwards at low wave number, the leading damping mechanism at low temperature is the Beliaev-Landau process 2 phonons $leftrightarrow$ 1 phonon while, when the concavity is downwards, it is the Landau-Khalatnikov process 2 phonons $leftrightarrow$ 2 phonons. In both cases, by rescaling the wave vectors to absorb the dependence on the interaction strength, we obtain a universal formula for the damping rate. This universal formula corrects and extends the original analytic results of Landau and Khalatnikov [ZhETF {bf 19}, 637 (1949)] for the $2leftrightarrow2$ processes in the downward concavity case. In the upward concavity case, for the Beliaev 1$leftrightarrow$ 2 process for the unitary gas at zero temperature, we calculate the damping rate of an excitation with wave number $q$ including the first correction proportional to $q^7$ to the $q^5$ hydrodynamic prediction, which was never done before in a systematic way.
Due to atomic interactions and dispersion in the total atom number, the order parameter of a pair-condensed Fermi gas experiences a collapse in a time that we derive microscopically. As in the bosonic case, this blurring time depends on the derivative of the gas chemical potential with respect to the atom number and on the variance of that atom number. The result is obtained first using linearized time-dependent Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations, then in the Random Phase Approximation, and then it is generalized to beyond mean field. In this framework, we construct and compare two phase operators for the paired fermionic field: The first one, issued from our study of the dynamics, is the infinitesimal generator of adiabatic translations in the total number of pairs. The second one is the phase operator of the amplitude of the field of pairs on the condensate mode. We explain that these two operators differ due to the dependence of the condensate wave function on the atom number.
We present an analysis of Bose-Fermi mixtures in optical lattices for the case where the lattice potential of the fermions is tilted and the bosons (in the superfluid phase) are described by Bogoliubov phonons. It is shown that the Bogoliubov phonons enable hopping transitions between fermionic Wannier-Stark states; these transitions are accompanied by energy dissipation into the superfluid and result in a net atomic current along the lattice. We derive a general expression for the drift velocity of the fermions and find that the dependence of the atomic current on the lattice tilt exhibits negative differential conductance and phonon resonances. Numerical simulations of the full dynamics of the system based on the time-evolving block decimation algorithm reveal that the phonon resonances should be observable under the conditions of a realistic measuring procedure.
We present measurements of the local (homogeneous) density-density response function of a Fermi gas at unitarity using spatially resolved Bragg spectroscopy. By analyzing the Bragg response across one axis of the cloud we extract the response function for a uniform gas which shows a clear signature of the Bose-Einstein condensation of pairs of fermions when the local temperature drops below the superfluid transition temperature. The method we use for local measurement generalizes a scheme for obtaining the local pressure in a harmonically trapped cloud from the line density and can be adapted to provide any homogeneous parameter satisfying the local density approximation.
We in this paper investigate the phase diagram associated with the BCS-BEC crossover of a three-component ultracold superfluid-Fermi-gas of different chemical-potentials and equal masses in two dimensions. The gap order parameter and number densities are found analytically by using the functional path-integral method. The balance of paring will be broken in the free space due to the unequal chemical-potentials. We obtain the same particle number-density and condensed fraction in the BCS superfluid phase as that in a recent paper (Phys. Rev. A 83, 033630), while the Sarma phase of coexistence of normal and superfluid Fermi gases is the characteristics of inhomogeneous system. The minimum ratio of BCS superfluid phase becomes 1/3 in the BCS limit corresponding to the zero-ratio in the two-component system in which the critical point of phase separation is {epsilon}B/{epsilon}F = 2 but becomes 3 in the three-component case.
Transverse spin diffusion in a polarized, interacting Fermi gas leads to the Leggett-Rice effect, where the spin current precesses around the local magnetization. With a spin-echo sequence both the transverse diffusivity and the spin-rotation parameter $gamma$ are obtained; the sign of $gamma$ reveals the repulsive or attractive character of the effective interaction. In a trapped Fermi gas the spin diffusion equations become nonlinear, and their numerical solution exhibits an inhomogeneous spin state even at the spin echo time. While the microscopic diffusivity and $gamma$ increase at weak coupling, their apparent values inferred from the trap-averaged magnetization saturate in agreement with a recent experiment for a dilute ultracold Fermi gas.