Critical velocities have been observed in an ultracold superfluid Fermi gas throughout the BEC-BCS crossover. A pronounced peak of the critical velocity at unitarity demonstrates that superfluidity is most robust for resonant atomic interactions. Critical velocities were determined from the abrupt onset of dissipation when the velocity of a moving one dimensional optical lattice was varied. The dependence of the critical velocity on lattice depth and on the inhomogeneous density profile was studied.
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 develop a microscopic model to describe the Josephson dynamics between two superfluid reservoirs of ultracold fermionic atoms which accounts for the dependence of the critical current on both the barrier height and the interaction strength along the crossover from BCS to BEC. Building on a previous study [F. Meier & W. Zwerger, Phys. Rev. A, 64 033610 (2001)] of weakly-interacting bosons, we derive analytic results for the Josephson critical current at zero temperature for homogeneous and trapped systems at arbitrary coupling. The critical current exhibits a maximum near the unitarity limit which arises from the competition between the increasing condensate fraction and a decrease of the chemical potential along the evolution from the BCS to the BEC limit. Our results agree quantitatively with numerical simulations and recent experimental data.
We report on the observation of the Josephson effect between two strongly interacting fermionic superfluids coupled through a thin tunneling barrier. We prove that the relative population and phase are canonically conjugate dynamical variables, coherently oscillating throughout the entire crossover from molecular Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) to Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superfluids. We measure the plasma frequency and we extract the Josephson coupling energy, both exhibiting a non-monotonic behavior with a maximum near the crossover regime. We also observe the transition from coherent to dissipative dynamics, which we directly ascribe to the propagation of vortices through the superfluid bulk. Our results highlight the robust nature of resonant superfluids, opening the door to the study of the dynamics of superfluid Fermi systems in the presence of strong correlations and fluctuations.
Reconnecting vortices in a superfluid allow for the energy transfer between different length scales and its subsequent dissipation. The present picture assumes that the dynamics of a reconnection is driven mostly by the phase of the order parameter, and this statement can be justified in the case of Bose-Einstein Condensates (BECs), where vortices have a simple internal structure. Therefore, it is natural to postulate that the reconnection dynamics in the vicinity of the reconnection moment is universal. This expectation has been confirmed in numerical simulations for BECs and experimentally for the superfluid ${}^4$He. Not much has been said about this relation in the context of Fermi superfluids. In this article we aim at bridging this gap, and we report our findings, which reveal that the reconnection dynamics conforms with the predicted universal behaviour across the entire BCS-BEC crossover. The universal scaling also survives for spin-imbalanced systems, where unpaired fermions induce a complex structure of the colliding vortices.
Using a two-channel model, we show that the number of closed channel molecules in a two-component Fermi gas close to a Feshbach resonance is directly related to the derivative of the energy of the gas with respect to the inverse scattering length. We extract this quantity from the fixed node Monte-Carlo equation of state and we compare to the number of closed channel molecules measured in the Rice experiment with lithium [Partridge et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 020404 (2005)]. We also discuss the effect of a difference between the trapping potentials seen by a closed-channel molecule and by an open-channel pair of atoms in terms of an effective position-dependent scattering length.