No Arabic abstract
A sufficiently large species imbalance (polarization) in a two-component Feshbach resonant Fermi gas is known to drive the system into its normal state. We show that the resulting strongly-interacting state is a conventional Fermi liquid, that is, however, strongly renormalized by pairing fluctuations. Using a controlled 1/N expansion, we calculate the properties of this state with a particular emphasis on the atomic spectral function, the momentum distribution functions displaying the Migdal discontinuity, and the radio frequency (RF) spectrum. We discuss the latter in the light of the recent experiments of Schunck et al. (cond-mat/0702066) on such a resonant Fermi gas, and show that the observations are consistent with a conventional, but strongly renormalized Fermi-liquid picture.
Weak attractive interactions in a spin-imbalanced Fermi gas induce a multi-particle instability, binding multiple fermions together. The maximum binding energy per particle is achieved when the ratio of the number of up- and down-spin particles in the instability is equal to the ratio of the up- and down-spin densities of states in momentum at the Fermi surfaces, to utilize the variational freedom of all available momentum states. We derive this result using an analytical approach, and verify it using exact diagonalization. The multi-particle instability extends the Cooper pairing instability of balanced Fermi gases to the imbalanced case, and could form the basis of a many-body state, analogously to the construction of the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer theory of superconductivity out of Cooper pairs.
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.
Radio-frequency techniques were used to study ultracold fermions. We observed the absence of mean-field clock shifts, the dominant source of systematic error in current atomic clocks based on bosonic atoms. This is a direct consequence of fermionic antisymmetry. Resonance shifts proportional to interaction strengths were observed in a three-level system. However, in the strongly interacting regime, these shifts became very small, reflecting the quantum unitarity limit and many-body effects. This insight into an interacting Fermi gas is relevant for the quest to observe superfluidity in this system.
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 have observed phase separation between the superfluid and the normal component in a strongly interacting Fermi gas with imbalanced spin populations. The in situ distribution of the density difference between two trapped spin components is obtained using phase-contrast imaging and 3D image reconstruction. A shell structure is clearly identified where the superfluid region of equal densities is surrounded by a normal gas of unequal densities. The phase transition induces a dramatic change in the density profiles as excess fermions are expelled from the superfluid.