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arXiv:1104.2924 · Physical Review A

Anomalous dimers in quantum mixtures near broad resonances: Pauli blocking, Fermi surface dynamics, and implications

Jun-Liang Song, Fei Zhou

Published Jul 5, 2011• 18 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We study the energetics and dispersion of anomalous dimers that are induced by the Pauli blocking effect in a quantum Fermi gas of majority atoms near interspecies resonances. Unlike in vacuum, we find that both the sign and magnitude of the dimer masses are tunable via Feshbach resonances. We also investigate the effects of particle-hole fluctuations on the dispersion of dimers and demonstrate that the particle-hole fluctuations near a Fermi surface (with Fermi momentum $\ensuremath{\hbar}{k}_{F}$) generally reduce the effective two-body interactions and the binding energy of dimers. Furthermore, in the limit of light minority atoms the particle-hole fluctuations disfavor the formation of dimers with a total momentum $\ensuremath{\hbar}{k}_{F}$, because near $\ensuremath{\hbar}{k}_{F}$ the modes where the dominating particle-hole fluctuations appear are the softest. Our calculation suggests that near broad interspecies resonances when the minority-majority mass ratio ${m}_{B}/{m}_{F}$ is smaller than a critical value (estimated to be $0.136$), dimers in a finite-momentum channel are energetically favored over dimers in the zero-momentum channel. We apply our theory to quantum gases of $^{6}\mathrm{Li}$$^{40}\mathrm{K}$, $^{6}\mathrm{Li}$$^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$, $^{40}\mathrm{K}$$^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$, and $^{6}\mathrm{Li}$$^{23}\mathrm{Na}$ near broad interspecies resonances, and discuss the limitations of our calculations and implications.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.84.013601

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We study the energetics and dispersion of anomalous dimers that are induced by the Pauli blocking effect in a quantum Fermi gas of majority atoms near interspecies resonances. Unlike in vacuum, we find that both the sign and magnitude of the dimer masses are tunable via Feshbach resonances. We also investigate the effects of particle-hole fluctuations on the dispersion of dimers and demonstrate that the particle-hole fluctuations near a Fermi surface (with Fermi momentum \ensuremathℏkF\ensuremath{\hbar}{k}_{F}\ensuremathℏkF​) generally reduce the effective two-body interactions and the binding energy of dimers. Furthermore, in the limit of light minority atoms the particle-hole fluctuations disfavor the formation of dimers with a total momentum \ensuremathℏkF\ensuremath{\hbar}{k}_{F}\ensuremathℏkF​, because near \ensuremathℏkF\ensuremath{\hbar}{k}_{F}\ensuremathℏkF​ the modes where the dominating particle-hole fluctuations appear are the softest. Our calculation suggests that near broad interspecies resonances when the minority-majority mass ratio mB/mF{m}_{B}/{m}_{F}mB​/mF​ is smaller than a critical value (estimated to be 0.1360.1360.136), dimers in a finite-momentum channel are energetically favored over dimers in the zero-momentum channel. We apply our theory to quantum gases of ^{6}\mathrm{Li}$$^{40}\mathrm{K}, ^{6}\mathrm{Li}$$^{87}\mathrm{Rb}, ^{40}\mathrm{K}$$^{87}\mathrm{Rb}, and ^{6}\mathrm{Li}$$^{23}\mathrm{Na} near broad interspecies resonances, and discuss the limitations of our calculations and implications.
We present a joint experimental and theoretical investigation of the lifetime of weakly bound dimers formed near narrow interspecies Feshbach resonances in mass-imbalanced Fermi-Fermi systems, considering the specific example of a mixture of 6Li^{6}\text{Li}6Li and 40K^{40}\text{K}40K atoms. Our work addresses the central question of the increase in the stability of the dimers resulting from Pauli suppression of collisional losses, which is a well-known effect in mass-balanced fermionic systems near broad resonances. We present measurements of the spontaneous dissociation of dimers in dilute samples, and of the collisional losses in dense samples arising from both dimer-dimer processes and from atom-dimer processes. We find that all loss processes are suppressed close to the Feshbach resonance. Our general theoretical approach for fermionic mixtures near narrow Feshbach resonances provides predictions for the suppression of collisional decay as a function of the detuning from resonance, and we find excellent agreement with the experimental benchmarks provided by our $^{6}\text{Li}\ensuremath{-}^{40}\text{K}$ system. We finally present model calculations for other Feshbach-resonant Fermi-Fermi systems, which are of interest for experiments in the near future.
In this Letter we study dressed bound states in Fermi-Bose mixtures near broad interspecies resonances, and implications on many-body correlations. We present the evidence for a first order phase transition between a mixture of Fermi gas and condensate, and a fully paired mixture where extended fermionic molecules occupy a single pairing channel instead of forming a molecular Fermi surface. We further investigate the effect of Fermi surface dynamics and pair fluctuations and discuss the validity of our results.
Few-body effects play an important role for the understanding of ultracold quantum gases. We make use of an effective field theory approach to investigate various aspects of universal few-body physics close to a Feshbach resonance. That is the regime where the scattering length is large compared to all other length scales of the system and thus determines the observables. It is also the regime where the Efimov effect whose main characteristic is the occurrence of a sequence of three-body bound states becomes important. At unitarity, i.e., for diverging scattering length, the ratio of binding energies of neighboring states approaches a constant. The existence of those trimers can be captured by a single three-body parameter and influences observables such as recombination rates. Starting from adequate Lagrangians, we derive atom-dimer scattering amplitudes that contain all information of interest about the three-particle systems. With this method, we first investigate the scattering of atoms and dimers at finite temperature in the presence of the Efimov effect. We calculate the dimer relaxation rate and obtain good agreement with available experimental data. Furthermore, heteronuclear mixtures exhibiting large interspecies scattering length are studied in detail. If bosons are the majority species, the Efimov effect occurs in an S-wave channel and we are able to compute three-body recombination and dimer relaxation rates. The results are compared to the outcome of two existing experiments. For mainly fermionic systems, the Efimov effect is only present in an overall P-wave and three-body recombination at threshold vanishes. However, in mixtures of atoms and dimers, scattering cross sections and dimer relaxation show the typical Efimov behavior of log-periodicity. We also consider two-dimensional Bose gases, where the Efimov effect does not occur. For those systems, we derive an equation including the first non-universal corrections and deduce three-body observables such as binding energies and atom-dimer scattering parameters.
At the location of a magnetic-field Feshbach resonance, a mixture gas of fermionic atoms and dimers of fermionic atom pairs is investigated in the unitarity limit where the absolute value of the scattering length is much larger than the mean distance between atoms. The dynamic equilibrium of the mixture gases is characterized by the minimum of the Gibbs free energy. For the fermionic atoms and dimers with divergent scattering length, it is found that the fraction of the dimers based on a very simple theory agrees with the high fraction of zero-momentum molecules observed in a recent experiment (M. W. Zwierlein et al, Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 120403 (2004)). The dimeric gas can be also used to interpret the frequency of the radial breathing mode observed in the experiment by J. Kinast et al (Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 150402 (2004)).
We consider a heteronuclear fermionic mixture on the molecular side of an interspecies Feshbach resonance and discuss atom-dimer scattering properties in uniform space and in the presence of an external confining potential, restricting the system to a quasi-two-dimensional geometry. We find that there is a peculiar atom-dimer p-wave resonance which can be tuned by changing the frequency of the confinement. Our results have implications for the ongoing experiments on lithium-potassium mixtures, where this mechanism allows for switching the p-wave interaction between a K atom and Li-K dimer from attractive to repulsive, and forming a weakly bound trimer with unit angular momentum. We show that such trimers are long lived and the atom-dimer resonance does not enhance inelastic relaxation in the mixture, making it an outstanding candidate for studies of p-wave resonance effects in a many-body system.
This doctoral dissertation is concerned with the physics of strongly interacting cold alkali atoms at low temperatures near a Feshbach resonance. In Chapter 1, we establish a connection between superfluid 4He and the BCS theory of superconductivity, and cold alkali atoms. We give the history of cold atoms, describing the significant achievements, pitfalls and challenges. In Chapter 2, we explore the thermodynamics of strongly interacting Bosonic atoms. We explore the stability of atomic Bosonic condensates near a Feshbach resonance. We show that the experimentally attained atomic condensate is a saddle point of the free energy, but the kinetics of its decay is slow. We also show that there is a second, higher density condensate branch which has an Ising-like phase transition to a molecular (paired) condensate when ramped across the Feshbach resonance. We argue that due to the high density, inelastic 3-body processes possibly render this transition unobservable. In Chapter 3, we explore the thermodynamics of Fermionic atoms near a Feshbach resonance. We determine the zero-temperature (T less than/less than T sub(F) ) pair propagator for a spinimbalanced mixture of up and down spin Fermions, and use it to show that such a mixture becomes completely polarized at mu sub(down arrow)= -0.9 mu sub(up arrow) . We also determine the Thouless criterion for superfluidity in a spin-imbalanced Fermi mixture, and construct a phase diagram of such a system at zero temperature. We then compare our results with experiments performed by two different groups. We find that interaction modifications to the minority spin self-energy inferred from our analysis is roughly double those observed in experiments. This discrepancy is consistent with the expected accuracy of the theory. In Chapter 4, we extend our analysis of the preceding chapter to calculate the surface tension of an interface between spin-polarized Fermions in the normal and superfluid phases. We show that, as expected, this surface tension decreases with increasing temperature and vanishes at a tricritical temperature, above which the transition becomes continuous. We also calculate the thickness of the interface; at T = 0, this is a few interparticle spacings, but diverges at the tricritical temperature. To compare with a set of relevant experiments, we also develop a phenomenological model for surface tension, and conclude that experimental surface tensions are an order of magnitude higher than what our microscopic calculation yields. We hypothesize possible mechanisms. In Chapter 5, we calculate the finite temperature phase diagram of a Bose-Fermi mixture produced from a spin-imbalanced two-component Fermi gas deep in the BEC phase. We show that there is a discontinuous transition between the superfluid and normal phase, with an entropy of mixing sufficient to cool the system down. We detail the construction of such a cooling scheme to cool a Fermi system below what is possible evaporatively, and find that the cooling efficiency is comparable to typical evaporative schemes. In Chapter 6, we shift our focus from thermodynamics to dynamics. We calculate shifts in the energy spectrum of a spin-balanced Fermionic superfluid of Cooper pairs due to the presence of energetically close states coupled by a Feshbach resonance. These shifts manifest themselves as clock-shifts in the radio-frequency spectrum of the superfluid. In addition to a broad asymmetric peak coming from the break-up of Cooper pairs, we find (for certain parameter ranges) a sharp, symmetric "bound-bound" spectral line coming from the conversion of Cooper pairs in one channel to pairs or molecules in another channel. Our theory shows remarkable quantitative agreement with experiments performed by an experimental group.