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arXiv:1012.2626 · Physical Review Letters

Temperature Dependence of the Universal Contact Parameter in a Unitary Fermi Gas

E. D. Kuhnle, Sascha Hoinka, Paul Dyke, Hui Hu, Peter Hannaford, Chris J. Vale

Published Apr 26, 2011• 90 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The contact I, introduced by Tan, has emerged as a key parameter characterizing universal properties of strongly interacting Fermi gases. For ultracold Fermi gases near a Feshbach resonance, the contact depends upon two quantities: the interaction parameter 1/(k(F)a), where k(F) is the Fermi wave vector and a is the s-wave scattering length, and the temperature T/T(F), where T(F) is the Fermi temperature. We present the first measurements of the temperature dependence of the contact in a unitary Fermi gas using Bragg spectroscopy. The contact is seen to follow the predicted decay with temperature and shows how pair-correlations at high momentum persist well above the superfluid transition temperature.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.106.170402

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The contact I, introduced by Tan, has emerged as a key parameter characterizing universal properties of strongly interacting Fermi gases. For ultracold Fermi gases near a Feshbach resonance, the contact depends upon two quantities: the interaction parameter 1/(k(F)a), where k(F) is the Fermi wave vector and a is the s-wave scattering length, and the temperature T/T(F), where T(F) is the Fermi temperature. We present the first measurements of the temperature dependence of the contact in a unitary Fermi gas using Bragg spectroscopy. The contact is seen to follow the predicted decay with temperature and shows how pair-correlations at high momentum persist well above the superfluid transition temperature.
We present a comprehensive experimental study of Tan's universal contact parameter in a two-component ultracold Fermi gas, using Bragg spectroscopy. The contact uniquely parameterizes a number of universal properties of Fermi gases in the strongly interacting regime. It is linked to the spin-antiparallel component of the static structure factor S ↑↓ ( k ) at high momenta, which can readily be obtained via Bragg scattering. Contact depends upon the relative interaction strength 1/( k F a ) and temperature T / T F , where k F is the Fermi wave vector, a is the s-wave scattering length and T F is the Fermi temperature. We present measurements of both of these dependencies in a cloud of 6 Li atoms and compare our findings to theoretical predictions. We also compare Bragg spectroscopic methods based on measuring the energy and momentum transferred to the cloud and examine the conditions under which the energy transfer method provides improved accuracy. Our measurements of the dynamic structure factor and contact are found to be in good agreement with theoretical predictions based on the quantum virial expansion.
This paper presents studies of the universal properties of strongly interacting Fermi gases using Bragg spectroscopy. We focus on pair-correlations, their relationship to the contact C introduced by Tan, and their dependence on both the momentum and temperature. We show that short-range pair correlations obey a universal law, first derived by Tan through measurements of the static structure factor, which displays a universal scaling with the ratio of the contact to the momentum C/q . Bragg spectroscopy of ultracold 6 Li atoms is employed to measure the structure factor for a wide range of momenta and interaction strengths, providing broad confirmation of this universal law. We show that calibrating our Bragg spectra using the f -sum rule leads to a dramatic improvement in the accuracy of the structure factor measurement. We also measure the temperature dependence of the contact in a unitary gas and compare our results to calculations based on a virial expansion.
By selectively probing the center of a trapped gas, we measure the local, or homogeneous, contact of a unitary Fermi gas as a function of temperature. Tan's contact, C, is proportional to the derivative of the energy with respect to the interaction strength and is thus an essential thermodynamic quantity for a gas with short-range correlations. Theoretical predictions for the temperature dependence of C differ substantially, especially near the superfluid transition, T(c), where C is predicted to either sharply decrease, sharply increase, or change very little. For T/T(F)>0.4, our measurements of the homogeneous gas contact show a gradual decrease of C with increasing temperature, as predicted by theory. We observe a sharp decrease in C at T/T(F)=0.16, which may be due to the superfluid phase transition. While a sharp decrease in C below T(c) is predicted by some many-body theories, we find that none of the predictions fully account for the data.
We present a high-precision determination of the universal contact parameter in a strongly interacting Fermi gas. In a trapped gas at unitarity, we find the contact to be 3.06±0.08 at a temperature of 0.08 of the Fermi temperature in a harmonic trap. The contact governs the high-momentum (short-range) properties of these systems, and this low-temperature measurement provides a new benchmark for the zero-temperature homogeneous contact. The experimental measurement utilizes Bragg spectroscopy to obtain the dynamic and static structure factors of ultracold Fermi gases at high momentum in the unitarity and molecular Bose-Einstein condensate regimes. We have also performed quantum Monte Carlo calculations of the static properties, extending from the weakly coupled BCS regime to the strongly coupled Bose-Einstein condensate case, that show agreement with experiment at the level of a few percent.
The Unitary Fermi Gas (UFG) is one of the most strongly interacting systems known to date, as it saturates the unitarity bound on the quantum mechanical scattering cross section. The UFG corresponds to a two-component Fermi gas in the limit of short interaction range and large scattering length, and is currently realized in ultracold-atom experiments via Feshbach resonances. While easy to define, the UFG poses a challenging quantum many-body problem, as it lacks any characteristic scale other than the density. As a consequence, accurate quantitative predictions of the thermodynamic properties of the UFG require Monte Carlo calculations. However, significant progress has also been made with purely analytical methods. Notably, in 2005 Tan derived a set of exact thermodynamic relations in which a universal quantity known as the "contact" C plays a crucial role. Recently, C has also been found to determine the prefactor of the high- frequency power-law decay of correlators as well as the right-hand-sides of shear- and bulk viscosity sum rules. The contact is therefore a central piece of information on the UFG in equilibrium as well as away from equilibrium. In this talk we describe some of the known aspects of Fermi gases at and around unitarity, show our latest Monte Carlo results for the contact at finite temperature, and summarize the open questions in the field, some of which we are starting to answer using large-scale Monte Carlo calculations by adapting methods from Lattice QCD.
The Unitary Fermi Gas (UFG) is one of the most strongly interacting systems known to date, as it saturates the unitarity bound on the quantum mechanical scattering cross section. The UFG corresponds to a two-component Fermi gas in the limit of short interaction range and large scattering length, and is currently realized in ultracold-atom experiments via Feshbach resonances. While easy to define, the UFG poses a challenging quantum many-body problem, as it lacks any characteristic scale other than the density. As a consequence, accurate quantitative predictions of the thermodynamic properties of the UFG require Monte Carlo calculations. However, significant progress has also been made with purely analytical methods. Notably, in 2005 Tan derived a set of exact thermodynamic relations in which a universal quantity known as the "contact" C plays a crucial role. Recently, C has also been found to determine the prefactor of the high- frequency power-law decay of correlators as well as the right-hand-sides of shear- and bulk viscosity sum rules. The contact is therefore a central piece of information on the UFG in equilibrium as well as away from equilibrium. In this talk we describe some of the known aspects of Fermi gases at and around unitarity, show our latest Monte Carlo results for the contact at finite temperature, and summarize the open questions in the field, some of which we are starting to answer using large-scale Monte Carlo calculations by adapting methods from Lattice QCD.