We study the two-particle wave function of paired atoms in a Fermi gas with tunable interaction strengths controlled by Feshbach resonance. The Cooper pair wave function is examined for its bosonic characters, which is quantified by the correction of the Bose enhancement factor associated with the creation and annihilation composite particle operators. An example is given for a three-dimensional uniform gas. Two definitions of Cooper pair wave function are examined. One of which is chosen to reflect the off-diagonal long range order (ODLRO). Another one corresponds to a pair projection of a BCS state. On the side with negative scattering length, we found that paired atoms described by ODLRO are more bosonic than the pair projected definition. It is also found that at ${({k}_{F}a)}^{\ensuremath{-}1}\ensuremath{\geqslant}1$, both definitions give similar results, where more than 90% of the atoms occupy the corresponding molecular condensates.
We study the two-particle wave function of paired atoms in a Fermi gas with tunable interaction strengths controlled by Feshbach resonance. The Cooper pair wave function is examined for its bosonic characters, which is quantified by the correction of the Bose enhancement factor associated with the creation and annihilation composite particle operators. An example is given for a three-dimensional uniform gas. Two definitions of Cooper pair wave function are examined. One of which is chosen to reflect the off-diagonal long range order (ODLRO). Another one corresponds to a pair projection of a BCS state. On the side with negative scattering length, we found that paired atoms described by ODLRO are more bosonic than the pair projected definition. It is also found that at (kFa)\ensuremath−1\ensuremath⩾1, both definitions give similar results, where more than 90% of the atoms occupy the corresponding molecular condensates.
The use of Feshbach resonances in the field of ultracold gases has received a lot of attention recently. In first instance it was realized that these resonances can be used to alter the interaction strength in an atomic gas, by means of tuning an external magnetic field. Furthermore, by sweeping the magnetic field from one side of the resonance to the other, a degenerate gas of bosonic molecules can be created, a significant accomplishment. By making the interactions between fermionic atoms strongly attractive, a fermionic superfluid was recently made, a feat that has drawn a lot of attention in the physics community and from the media. We present work that describes these many-particle systems near a Feshbach resonance in a comprehensive way by using the concept of dressed molecules. These dressed molecules are essentially two-particle states that are a superposition of a tightly bound bare molecule, and two unbound bare atoms. This description reduces to the correct paired wave-function in the two-body limit. Moreover it gives a physically correct description of all the phenomena mentioned above: the Bose-condensation of a gas near a Feshbach resonance, that contains molecules, is more correctly interpreted as a Bose-condensation of dressed molecules. The fermionic superfluid contains a condensate of bosonic pairs, normally called Cooper pairs, that can be understood as the dressed molecules. For the latter case, the dressed-molecule picture also gives an elegant characterization of the crossover between a Bose condensate of pure molecules on one side of the resonance, to a fermionic Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer superfluid on the other side. Then, the dressed molecules change continuously from being mostly a bare molecule, to being mostly a loose pair of two atoms. It is clear that the nature of the dressed molecules is much determined by the probability for it to be in the bare-molecular state. This probability we denote with a single parameter Z. We present various ways of calculating it, and study how it affects the macroscopic physics.
We investigate strong-coupling superfluidity in a uniform two-component gas of ultracold Fermi atoms attractively interacting via quasimolecular bosons associated with a Feshbach resonance. This interaction is tunable by the threshold energy $2\ensuremath{\nu}$ of the Feshbach resonance, becoming large as $2\ensuremath{\nu}$ is decreased (relative to $2{\ensuremath{\varepsilon}}_{\mathrm{F}},$ where ${\ensuremath{\varepsilon}}_{\mathrm{F}}$ is the Fermi energy of one component). In recent work, we showed that the enhancement of this tunable pairing interaction naturally leads to the BCS-BEC (Bose-Einstein condensation) crossover, where the character of the superfluid phase transition changes from the BCS type to a BEC of composite bosons consisting of preformed Cooper-pairs and Feshbach-induced molecules. In this paper, we extend our previous work and study both the quasiparticles and the collective dynamics of the superfluid phase below the phase-transition temperature Tc, limiting ourselves to a uniform gas. We show how the superfluid order parameter changes from the Cooper-pair amplitude $\ensuremath{\Delta}$ to the square root of the number of condensed molecules $({\ensuremath{\varphi}}_{\mathrm{m}})$ associated with the Feshbach resonance, as the threshold energy $2\ensuremath{\nu}$ is lowered. In the intermediate coupling regime, the superfluidity is shown to be characterized by an order parameter consisting of a superposition of $\ensuremath{\Delta}$ and ${\ensuremath{\varphi}}_{\mathrm{m}}.$ We also discuss the Goldstone mode associated with superfluidity, and show how its character smoothly changes from the Anderson-Bogoliubov phonon in the BCS regime to the Bogoliubov phonon in the BEC regime in the BCS-BEC crossover. The velocity of this Goldstone phonon mode is shown to strongly depend on the value of $2\ensuremath{\nu}.$ We also show that this Goldstone mode appears as a resonance in the spectrum of the density-density correlation function, which is experimentally accessible.
We discuss the effect of a molecular Bose condensate on the energy of Fermi excitations in a trapped two-component atomic Fermi gas. The single-particle Green's functions can be approximated by the well-known BCS form, in both the BCS (Cooper pairs) and BEC (Feshbach resonance molecules) domains. The composite Bose order parameter Δ~ describing bound states of two atoms and the Fermi chemical potential μ are calculated self-consistently. In the BEC regime characterized by μ<0, the Fermi quasiparticle energy gap is given by μ2+Δ~2, instead of ∣Δ~∣ in the BCS region, where μ>0. This shows up in the characteristic energy of atoms from dissociated molecules.
We investigate the single-particle properties at T=0 of a trapped superfluid gas of Fermi atoms with a Feshbach resonance. A tunable pairing interaction associated with the Feshbach resonance leads to the BCS--Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) crossover, where the character of superfluidity continuously changes from the BCS-type to a BEC of composite bosons. In this paper, we extend our previous work for a uniform superfluid Fermi gas [Y. Ohashi and A. Griffin, Phys. Rev. A 67, 063612 (2003)] to include the effect of a harmonic trap. We do not use the local density approximation (LDA), but directly solve the Bogoliubov--de Gennes (BdG) coupled equations. While our explicit numerical solutions are for a weak (narrow) Feshbach resonance, we argue that the single-particle BdG excitation spectrum will exhibit the same features for a strong (broad) Feshbach resonance. Using these equations, we find self-consistent values for the spatially dependent local density n(r) as well as the composite BCS order parameter $\stackrel{\ifmmode \tilde{}\else \~{}\fi{}}{\ensuremath{\Delta}}(\mathbf{r})$, the latter describing both the Cooper-pair and molecular condensate contributions. Using these results, we calculate the single-particle density of states in the crossover region, and from this determine the true single-particle energy gap (Eg) of the trapped Fermi superfluid. This is associated with the in-gap (or Andreev) states in the low-density region at the edge of the trap. We calculate the laser-induced tunneling current $I(\ensuremath{\omega})$ into another hyperfine state, as measured in recent rf spectroscopy experiments. This rf spectrum gives a direct probe of the quasiparticle spectrum. We show how the high-energy part of $I(\ensuremath{\omega})$ gives information about $\stackrel{\ifmmode \tilde{}\else \~{}\fi{}}{\ensuremath{\Delta}}(r=0)$ at the center of the trap (which is comparable to the Fermi energy ${\ensuremath{\epsilon}}_{F}$ in the crossover region). We show that $I(\ensuremath{\omega})$ is very dependent on the spatial profile of the pair potential $\stackrel{\ifmmode \tilde{}\else \~{}\fi{}}{\ensuremath{\Delta}}(r)$ that is used. We also emphasize that the narrow ``unpaired atom" peak in the rf data gives information about Eg and the low-energy $(⪡{\ensuremath{\epsilon}}_{F})$ in-gap states of a Fermi superfluid. While our calculations are limited to T=0, we use them to discuss the recent data of Chin et al. and the LDA calculations of T\"orm\"a and co-workers. The LDA, while useful, can lead to an incorrect physical picture of the low-density surface region of the Fermi superfluid.
We show that the thermodynamic properties of an atomic Fermi gas near the unitarity limit for Feshbach scattering is not universal as long as the resonance is narrow on the scale of the Fermi energy. In view of ongoing quantum Monte Carlo simulations, we explore this behavior within a mean-field approach extended to a finite temperature by means of a model potential, which allows for a tuning of the scattering phase shift and its energy dependence. Our results may be relevant for constructing a complete theoretical description of the crossover from a Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of composite bosons to a Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) of Cooper pairs.
The Feshbach resonance provides precise control over the scattering length and effective range of interactions between ultracold atoms. We propose the ultratransferable pseudopotential to model effective interaction ranges $\ensuremath{-}1.5\ensuremath{\le}{k}_{\mathrm{F}}^{2}{R}_{\mathrm{eff}}^{2}\ensuremath{\le}0$, where Reff is the effective range and kF is the Fermi wave vector, describing narrow to broad Feshbach resonances. We develop a mean-field treatment and exploit the pseudopotential to perform a variational and diffusion Monte Carlo study of the ground state of the two-dimensional Fermi gas, reporting on the ground-state energy, contact, condensate fraction, momentum distribution, and pair-correlation functions as a function of the effective interaction range across the BEC-BCS crossover. The limit ${k}_{\mathrm{F}}^{2}{R}_{\mathrm{eff}}^{2}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\infty}$ is a gas of bosons with zero binding energy, whereas $ln({k}_{\mathrm{F}}a)\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\infty}$ corresponds to noninteracting bosons with infinite binding energy.