arXiv:0906.4300 · Physical Review A
BCS-BEC crossover with unequal-mass fermions
Roberto B. Diener, Mohit Randeria
Abstract
We investigate the crossover from BCS pairing to molecular Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) in an atomic gas with two fermion species with masses ${m}_{\ensuremath{\uparrow}}\ensuremath{\ne}{m}_{\ensuremath{\downarrow}}$ tuned through a Feshbach resonance. We present results for the $T=0$ equation of state as a function of the scattering length including the effects of Gaussian fluctuations about the mean field ground state. We compute the ground state energy as a function of ${m}_{\ensuremath{\uparrow}}/{m}_{\ensuremath{\downarrow}}$ at unitarity and find excellent agreement with the quantum Monte Carlo result for ${m}_{\ensuremath{\uparrow}}/{m}_{\ensuremath{\downarrow}}=6.67$ for a $^{40}\mathrm{K}$-$^{6}\mathrm{Li}$ mixture. We show that the dimer scattering length in the BEC limit as a function of ${m}_{\ensuremath{\uparrow}}/{m}_{\ensuremath{\downarrow}}$ compares well with the exact four-body results of Petrov et al. [J. Phys. B 38, S645 (2005)]. We also derive the condition for trapping frequencies to obtain an unpolarized gas in a harmonic trap.