No Arabic abstract
The contact ${cal I}$, introduced by Tan, has emerged as a key parameter characterizing universal properties of strongly interacting Fermi gases. For ultracold Fermi gases near a Feshbach resonance, the contact depends upon two quantities: the interaction parameter $1/(k_F a)$, where $k_F$ is the Fermi wave-vector and $a$ is the $s$-wave scattering length, and the temperature $T/T_F$, where $T_F$ is the Fermi temperature. We present the first measurements of the temperature dependence of the contact in a unitary Fermi gas using Bragg spectroscopy. The contact is seen to follow the predicted decay with temperature and shows how pair-correlations at high momentum persist well above the superfluid transition temperature.
We measure radiofrequency (rf) spectra of the homogeneous unitary Fermi gas at temperatures ranging from the Boltzmann regime through quantum degeneracy and across the superfluid transition. For all temperatures, a single spectral peak is observed. Its position smoothly evolves from the bare atomic resonance in the Boltzmann regime to a frequency corresponding to nearly one Fermi energy at the lowest temperatures. At high temperatures, the peak width reflects the scattering rate of the atoms, while at low temperatures, the width is set by the size of fermion pairs. Above the superfluid transition, and approaching the quantum critical regime, the width increases linearly with temperature, indicating non-Fermi-liquid behavior. From the wings of the rf spectra, we obtain the contact, quantifying the strength of short-range pair correlations. We find that the contact rapidly increases as the gas is cooled below the superfluid transition.
We present an experimental and theoretical study of the phonon mode in a unitary Fermi gas. Using two-photon Bragg spectroscopy, we measure excitation spectra at a momentum of approximately half the Fermi momentum, both above and below the superfluid critical temperature $T_mathrm{c}$. Below $T_mathrm{c}$, the dominant excitation is the Bogoliubov-Anderson (BA) phonon mode, driven by gradients in the phase of the superfluid order parameter. The temperature dependence of the BA phonon is consistent with a theoretical model based on the quasiparticle random phase approximation in which the dominant damping mechanism is via collisions with thermally excited quasiparticles. As the temperature is increased above $T_mathrm{c}$, the phonon evolves into a strongly damped collisional mode, accompanied by an abrupt increase in spectral width. Our study reveals strong similarities between sound propagation in the unitary Fermi gas and liquid helium.
We observe that the diffusive spin current in a strongly interacting degenerate Fermi gas of $^{40}$K precesses about the local magnetization. As predicted by Leggett and Rice, precession is observed both in the Ramsey phase of a spin-echo sequence, and in the nonlinearity of the magnetization decay. At unitarity, we measure a Leggett-Rice parameter $gamma = 1.08(9)$ and a bare transverse spin diffusivity $D_0^perp = 2.3(4),hbar/m$ for a normal-state gas initialized with full polarization and at one fifth of the Fermi temperature, where $m$ is the atomic mass. One might expect $gamma = 0$ at unitarity, where two-body scattering is purely dissipative. We observe $gamma rightarrow 0$ as temperature is increased towards the Fermi temperature, consistent with calculations that show the degenerate Fermi sea restores a non-zero $gamma$. Tuning the scattering length $a$, we find that a sign change in $gamma$ occurs in the range $0 < (k_F a)^{-1} lesssim 1.3$, where $k_F$ is the Fermi momentum. We discuss how $gamma$ reveals the effective interaction strength of the gas, such that the sign change in $gamma$ indicates a switching of branch, between a repulsive and an attractive Fermi gas.
Quantized vortices carry the angular momentum in rotating superfluids, and are key to the phenomenon of quantum turbulence. Advances in ultra-cold atom technology enable quantum turbulence to be studied in regimes with both experimental and theoretical control, unlike the original contexts of superfluid helium experiments. While much work has been performed with bosonic systems, detailed studies of fermionic quantum turbulence are nascent, despite wide applicability to other contexts such as rotating neutron stars. In this paper, we present the first large-scale study of quantum turbulence in rotating fermionic superfluids using an accurate orbital based time-dependent density functional theory (DFT) called the superfluid local density approximation (SLDA). We identify two different modes of turbulent decay in the dynamical equilibration of a rotating fermionic superfluid, and contrast these results with a computationally simpler orbital-free DFT, which we find can qualitatively reproduce these decay mechanisms if dissipation is explicitly included. These results demonstrate that one-body dissipation mechanisms intrinsic to fermionic superfluids play a key role differentiating fermionic from bosonic turbulence, but also suggest that simpler orbital-free theories may be corrected so that these more efficient techniques can be used to model extended physical systems such as neutron superfluids in neutron stars.
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.