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arXiv:0903.5366 · Physical Review Letters

Virial Expansion for a Strongly Correlated Fermi Gas

Xia-Ji Liu, Hui Hu, P. D. Drummond

Published Apr 22, 2009• 174 citations
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Abstract

Using a high temperature virial expansion, we present a controllable study of the thermodynamics of strongly correlated Fermi gases near the BEC-BCS crossover region. We propose a practical way to determine the expansion coefficients for both harmonically trapped and homogeneous cases, and calculate the third order coefficient b{3}(T) at finite temperatures T. At resonance, a T-independent coefficient b{3,infinity};{hom} approximately -0.290 952 95 is determined in free space. These results are compared with a recent thermodynamic measurement of 6Li atoms, at temperatures below the degeneracy temperature, and with Monte Carlo simulations.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.102.160401

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Quantum virial expansion provides an ideal tool to investigate the high-temperature properties of a strongly correlated Fermi gas. Here, we construct the virial expansion in the presence of spin-population imbalance. Up to the third order, we calculate the high-temperature free energy of a unitary Fermi gas as a function of spin imbalance, with infinitely large attractive or repulsive interactions. In the latter repulsive case, we show that there is no itinerant ferromagnetism when quantum virial expansion is applicable. We therefore estimate an upper bound for the ferromagnetic transition temperature Tc{T}_{c}Tc​. For a harmonically trapped Fermi gas at unitarity, we find that (Tc)upper<TF({T}_{c}){}_{\mathrm{upper}}<{T}_{F}(Tc​)upper​<TF​, where TF{T}_{F}TF​ is the Fermi temperature at the center of the trap. Our result for the high-temperature equations of state may confront future high-precision thermodynamic measurements.
By developing a quantum virial expansion theory, we quantitatively calculate the dynamic density response function of a trapped strongly interacting Fermi gas at high temperatures near unitarity. A clear transition from atomic to molecular responses is identified in the spectra when crossing from the BCS to BEC regimes, in qualitative agreement with recent Bragg spectroscopy observations. Our virial expansion method provides a promising way to solve the challenging strong-coupling problems and is applicable to other dynamical properties of strongly correlated Fermi gases.
The recently discovered universal thermodynamic behavior of dilute, strongly interacting Fermi gases also implies a universal structure in the many-body pair-correlation function at short distances, as quantified by the contact . Here, we theoretically calculate the temperature dependence of this universal contact for a Fermi gas in free space and in a harmonic trap. At high temperatures above the Fermi degeneracy temperature, T ≳ T F , we obtain a reliable non-perturbative quantum virial expansion up to third order. At low temperatures, we compare different approximate strong-coupling theories. These make different predictions, which need to be tested either by future experiments or by advanced quantum Monte Carlo simulations. We conjecture that in the universal unitarity limit, the contact or correlation decreases monotonically with increasing temperature, unless the temperature is significantly lower than the critical temperature, T ≪ T c ∼0.2 T F . We also discuss briefly how to measure the universal contact in either homogeneous or harmonically trapped Fermi gases.
Thermodynamic properties of a Fermi system close to the unitarity limit, where the 2-body scattering length a approaches +/-infinity, are studied in the high temperature Boltzmann regime. For dilute systems the virial expansion coefficients in the Boltzmann regime are expected, from general arguments, to be universal. A model independent finite temperature T calculation of the third virial coefficient b3(T) is presented. At the unitarity limit, b3infinity approximately 1.11 is a universal number. The energy density up to the third virial expansion is derived. These calculations are of interest in dilute neutron matter and could be tested in current atomic experiments on dilute Fermi gases near the Feshbach resonance.
We compare the theoretical predictions for universal thermodynamics of a homogeneous, strongly correlated Fermi gas with the latest experimental measurements reported by the ENS group [S. Nascimb\`ene et al., Nature (London) 463, 1057 (2010)] and the Tokyo group [M. Horikoshi et al., Science 327, 442 (2010)]. The theoretical results are obtained using two diagrammatic theories, together with a virial expansion theory combined with a P\'ade approximation. We find good agreement between theory and experiment. In particular, the virial expansion, using a P\'ade approximation up to third order, describes the experimental results extremely well down to the superfluid transition temperature, Tc 0.16TF{T}_{c}~0.16{T}_{F}Tc​ 0.16TF​, where TF{T}_{F}TF​ is the Fermi temperature. The comparison in this work complements our previous comparative study on the universal thermodynamics of a strongly correlated but trapped Fermi gas. The comparison also raises interesting issues about the unitary entropy and the applicability of the P\'ade approximation.