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arXiv:0708.2734 · Physical Review Letters

Universal Properties of a Trapped Two-Component Fermi Gas at Unitarity

D. Blume, J. von Stecher, Chris H. Greene

Published Dec 6, 2007• 113 citations
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Abstract

We treat the trapped two-component Fermi system, in which unlike fermions interact through a two-body short-range potential having no bound state but an infinite scattering length. By accurately solving the Schrödinger equation for up to N=6 fermions, we show that no many-body bound states exist other than those bound by the trapping potential, and we demonstrate unique universal properties of the system: Certain excitation frequencies are separated by 2variant Planck's over 2piomega, the wave functions agree with analytical predictions and a virial theorem is fulfilled. Further calculations up to N=30 determine the excitation gap, an experimentally accessible universal quantity, and it agrees with recent predictions based on a density functional approach.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.99.233201

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We treat the trapped two-component Fermi system, in which unlike fermions interact through a two-body short-range potential having no bound state but an infinite scattering length. By accurately solving the Schrödinger equation for up to N=6 fermions, we show that no many-body bound states exist other than those bound by the trapping potential, and we demonstrate unique universal properties of the system: Certain excitation frequencies are separated by 2variant Planck's over 2piomega, the wave functions agree with analytical predictions and a virial theorem is fulfilled. Further calculations up to N=30 determine the excitation gap, an experimentally accessible universal quantity, and it agrees with recent predictions based on a density functional approach.
Abstract We revisit the properties of the two-component Fermi gas with short-range interactions in three dimensions, in the limit where the s -wave scattering length diverges. Such a unitary Fermi gas possesses universal thermodynamic and dynamical observables that are independent of any interaction length scale. Focusing on trapped systems of N fermions, where N ≤ 10 , we investigate how well we can determine the zero-temperature behavior of the many-body system from published few-body data on the ground-state energy and the contact. For the unpolarized case, we find that the Bertsch parameters extracted from trapped few-body systems all lie within 15% of the established value. Furthermore, the few-body values for the contact are well within the range of values determined in the literature for the many-body system. In the limit of large spin polarization, we obtain a similar accuracy for the polaron energy, and we estimate the polaron’s effective mass from the dependence of its energy on N . We also compute an upper bound for the squared wave-function overlap between the unitary Fermi system and the non-interacting ground state, both for the trapped and uniform cases. This allows us to prove that the trapped unpolarized ground state at unitarity has zero overlap with its non-interacting counterpart in the many-body limit N → ∞ .
We consider population-imbalanced two-component Fermi gases under external harmonic confinement interacting through short-range two-body potentials with diverging sss-wave scattering length. Using the fixed-node diffusion Monte Carlo method, the energies of the ``normal state'' are determined as functions of the population imbalance and the number of particles. The energies of the trapped system follow, to a good approximation, a universal curve even for fairly small systems. A simple parametrization of the universal curve is presented and related to the equation of state of the bulk system.
We elucidate universal many-body properties of a one-dimensional, two-component ultracold Fermi gas near the ppp-wave Feshbach resonance. The low-energy scattering in this system can be characterized by two parameters, that is, ppp-wave scattering length and effective range. At the unitarity limit where the ppp-wave scattering length diverges and the effective range is reduced to zero without conflicting with the causality bound, the system obeys universal thermodynamics as observed in a unitary Fermi gas with contact sss-wave interaction in three dimensions. It is in contrast to a Fermi gas with the ppp-wave resonance in three dimensions in which the effective range is inevitably finite. We present the universal equation of state in this unitary ppp-wave Fermi gas within the many-body TTT-matrix approach as well as the virial expansion method. Moreover, we examine the single-particle spectral function in the high-density regime where the virial expansion is no longer valid. On the basis of the Hartree-like self-energy shift at the divergent scattering length, we conjecture that the equivalence of the Bertsch parameter across spatial dimensions holds even for a one-dimensional unitary ppp-wave Fermi gas.
We treat small trapped unequal-mass two-component Fermi gases at unitarity within a nonperturbative microscopic framework and investigate the system properties as functions of the mass ratio κ, and the numbers N1 and N2 of heavy and light fermions. While equal-mass Fermi gases with infinitely large interspecies s-wave scattering length a(s) are universal, we find that unequal-mass Fermi gases are, for sufficiently large κ and in the regime where Efimov physics is absent, not universal. In particular, the (N₁,N₂) = (2, 1) and (3, 1) systems exhibit three-body and four-body resonances at κ=12.314(2) and 10.4(2), respectively, as well as surprisingly large finite-range effects. These findings have profound implications for ongoing experimental efforts and quantum simulation proposals that utilize unequal-mass atomic Fermi gases.
Two-component equal-mass Fermi gases, in which unlike atoms interact through a short-range two-body potential and like atoms do not interact, are stable even when the interspecies sss-wave scattering length becomes infinitely large. Solving the many-body Schr\"odinger equation within a hyperspherical framework and by Monte Carlo techniques, this paper investigates how the properties of trapped two-component gases change if a third or fourth component are added. If all interspecies scattering lengths are equal and negative, our calculations suggest that both three- and four-component Fermi gases become unstable for a certain critical set of parameters. The relevant length scale associated with the collapse is set by the interspecies scattering length and we argue that the collapse is similar to the collapse of an attractive trapped Bose gas, a many-body phenomenon. Furthermore, we consider a three-component Fermi gas in which two interspecies scattering lengths are negative while the other interspecies scattering length is zero. In this case, the stability of the Fermi system is predicted to depend appreciably on the range of the underlying two-body potential. We find parameter combinations for which the system appears to become unstable for a finite negative scattering length and parameter combinations for which the system appears to be made up of weakly bound trimers that consist of one fermion of each species.
Using two different numerical methods, we study the behavior of two-component Fermi gases interacting through short-range sss-wave interactions in a harmonic trap. A correlated Gaussian basis-set expansion technique is used to determine the energies and structural properties, i.e., the radial one-body densities and pair distribution functions, for small systems with either even or odd NNN, as functions of the sss-wave scattering length and the mass ratio $\ensuremath{\kappa}$ of the two species. Particular emphasis is put on a discussion of the angular momentum of the system in the BEC-BCS crossover regime. At unitarity, the excitation spectrum of the four-particle system with total angular momentum L=0L=0L=0 is calculated as a function of the mass ratio $\ensuremath{\kappa}$. The results are analyzed from a hyperspherical perspective, which offers unique insight into the problem. Additionally, fixed-node diffusion Monte Carlo calculations are performed for equal-mass Fermi gases with up to N=30N=30N=30 atoms. We focus on the odd-even oscillations of the ground-state energy of the equal-mass unitary system having up to N=30N=30N=30 particles, which are related to the excitation gap of the system. Furthermore, we present a detailed analysis of the structural properties of these systems.