We analyze when a repulsively interacting two-component Fermi gas becomes thermodynamically unstable against phase separation. We focus on the strongly polarized limit, where the free energy of the homogeneous mixture can be calculated accurately in terms of well-defined quasiparticles, the repulsive polarons. Phase diagrams as a function of polarization, temperature, mass imbalance, and repulsive polaron energy, as well as scattering length and range parameter, are provided. We show that the lifetime of the repulsive polaron increases significantly with the interaction range and the mass of the minority atoms, raising the prospects of detecting the transition to the elusive itinerant ferromagnetic state with ultracold atoms.
The ground-state properties of two-component repulsive Fermi gases in two dimensions are investigated by means of fixed-node diffusion Monte Carlo simulations. The energy per particle is determined as a function of the intercomponent interaction strength and of the population imbalance. The regime of universality in terms of the
s-wave scattering length is identified by comparing results for hard-disk and for soft-disk potentials. In the large imbalance regime, the equation of state turns out to be well described by a Landau-Pomeranchuk functional for two-dimensional polarons. To fully characterize this expansion, we determine the polarons' effective mass and their coupling parameter, complementing previous studies on their chemical potential. Furthermore, we extract the magnetic susceptibility from low-imbalance data, finding only small deviations from the mean-field prediction. While the mean-field theory predicts a direct transition from a paramagnetic to a fully ferromagnetic phase, our diffusion Monte Carlo results suggest that the partially ferromagnetic phase is stable in a narrow interval of the interaction parameter. This finding calls for further analyses on the effects due to the fixed-node constraint.
Using continuous-space quantum Monte Carlo methods, we investigate the zero-temperature ferromagnetic behavior of a two-component repulsive Fermi gas under the influence of periodic potentials that describe the effect of a simple-cubic optical lattice. Simulations are performed with balanced and with imbalanced components, including the case of a single impurity immersed in a polarized Fermi sea (repulsive polaron). For an intermediate density below half filling, we locate the transitions between the paramagnetic, and the partially and fully ferromagnetic phases. As the intensity of the optical lattice increases, the ferromagnetic instability takes place at weaker interactions, indicating a possible route to observe ferromagnetism in experiments performed with ultracold atoms. We compare our findings with previous predictions based on the standard computational method used in material science, namely density functional theory, and with results based on tight-binding models.
It is generally believed that a dilute spin-
21 Fermi gas with repulsive interactions can undergo a ferromagnetic phase transition to a spin-polarized state at a critical gas parameter
(kFa)c. Previous theoretical predictions of the ferromagnetic phase transition have been based on the perturbation theory, which treats the gas parameter as a small number. On the other hand, Belitz, Kirkpatrick, and Vojta (BKV) have argued that the phase transition in clean itinerant ferromagnets is generically of first order at low temperatures, due to the correlation effects that lead to a nonanalytic term in the free energy. The second-order perturbation theory predicts a first-order phase transition at
(kFa)c=1.054, consistent with the BKV argument. However, since the critical gas parameter is expected to be of order
O(1), perturbative predictions may be unreliable. In this paper we study the nonperturbative effects on the ferromagnetic phase transition by summing the particle-particle ladder diagrams to all orders in the gas parameter. We consider a universal repulsive Fermi gas where the effective range effects can be neglected, which can be realized in a two-component Fermi gas of
6Li atoms by using a nonadiabatic field switch to the upper branch of a Feshbach resonance with a positive
s-wave scattering length. Our theory predicts a second-order phase transition, which indicates that ferromagnetic transition in dilute Fermi gases is possibly a counterexample to the BKV argument. The predicted critical gas parameter
(kFa)c=0.858 is in good agreement with the recent quantum Monte Carlo result
(kFa)c=0.86 for a nearly zero-range potential [S. Pilati et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 030405 (2010)]. We also compare the spin susceptibility with the quantum Monte Carlo result and find good agreement.
We predict the phase separations of two-dimensional Fermi gases with repulsive contact-type interactions between two spin components. Using density-potential functional theory with systematic semiclassical approximations, we address the long-standing problem of itinerant ferromagnetism in realistic settings. We reveal a universal transition from the paramagnetic state at small repulsive interactions toward ferromagnetic density profiles at large interaction strengths, with intricate particle-number dependent phases in between. Building on quantum Monte Carlo results for uniform systems, we benchmark our simulations against Hartree–Fock calculations for a small number of trapped fermions. We thereby demonstrate that our employed corrections to the bare contact interaction energy and especially to the Thomas–Fermi kinetic energy functional are necessary for reliably predicting properties of trapped mesoscopic Fermi gases. The density patterns of the ground state survive at low finite temperatures and confirm the Stoner-type polarization behavior across a universal interaction parameter, albeit with substantial quantitative differences that originate in the trapping potential and the quantum-corrected kinetic energy. We also uncover a plethora of metastable configurations that are energetically comparable to the ground-state density profiles and are thus likely to be observed in experiments. We argue that our density-functional approach can be easily applied to interacting multi-component Fermi gases in general.
We theoretically investigate the itinerant ferromagnetic transition of a spherically trapped ultracold Fermi gas with spin imbalance under strongly repulsive interatomic interactions. Our study is based on a self-consistent solution of the Hartree-Fock mean-field equations beyond the widely used local-density approximation. We demonstrate that, while the local-density approximation holds in the paramagnetic phase, after the ferromagnetic transition it leads to a quantitative discrepancy in various thermodynamic quantities even with large atom numbers. We determine the position of the phase transition by monitoring the shape change of the free-energy curve with increasing the polarization at various interaction strengths.