arXiv:1105.4933 · Physical Review A
Auxiliary field formalism for dilute fermionic atom gases with tunable interactions
Bogdan Mihaila, John F. Dawson, Fred Cooper, Chih-Chun Chien, Eddy Timmermans
Abstract
We develop the auxiliary field formalism corresponding to a dilute system of spin-1/2 fermions. This theory represents the Fermi counterpart of the Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) theory developed recently by F. Cooper et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 240402 (2010)] to describe a dilute gas of Bose particles. Assuming tunable interactions, this formalism is appropriate for the study of the crossover from the regime of Bardeen-Cooper-Schriffer (BCS) pairing to the regime of BEC in ultracold fermionic atom gases. We show that when applied to the Fermi case at zero temperature, the leading-order auxiliary field (LOAF) approximation gives the same equations as obtained in the standard BCS variational picture. At finite temperature, LOAF leads to the theory discussed by S\'a de Melo, Randeria, and Engelbrecht [Phys. Rev. Lett. 71, 3202 (1993); Phys. Rev. B 55, 15153 (1997)]. As such, LOAF provides a unified framework to study the interacting Fermi gas. The mean-field results discussed here can be systematically improved on by calculating the one-particle irreducible action corrections, order by order.