The phase diagrams of low density Fermi-Fermi mixtures with equal or unequal masses and equal or unequal populations are described at zero and finite temperatures in the strong attraction limit. In this limit, the Fermi-Fermi mixture can be described by a weakly interacting Bose-Fermi mixture, where the bosons correspond to Feshbach molecules and the fermions correspond to excess atoms. First, we discuss the three and four fermion scattering processes, and use the exact boson-fermion and boson-boson scattering lengths to generate the phase diagrams in terms of the underlying fermion-fermion scattering length. In three dimensions, in addition to the normal and uniform superfluid phases, we find two stable nonuniform states corresponding to (i) phase separation between pure unpaired (excess) and pure paired fermions (molecular bosons); and (ii) phase separation between pure excess fermions and a mixture of excess fermions and molecular bosons. Lastly, we also discuss the effects of the trapping potential in the density profiles of condensed and noncondensed molecular bosons, and excess fermions at zero and finite temperatures, and discuss possible implications of our findings to experiments involving mixtures of ultracold fermions.
We investigate magnetic properties and statistical effects in one-dimensional (1D) strongly repulsive two-component fermions and in a 1D mixture of strongly repulsive polarized fermions and bosons. Universality in the characteristics of phase transitions, magnetization, and susceptibility in the presence of an external magnetic field
H are analyzed from the exact thermodynamic Bethe ansatz solution. We show explicitly that polarized fermions with a repulsive interaction have antiferromagnetic behavior at zero temperature. A universality class of linear field-dependent magnetization persists for weak and finite strong interaction. The system is fully polarized when the external field exceeds the critical value ${H}_{c}^{F}\ensuremath{\approx}\frac{8}{\ensuremath{\gamma}}{E}_{F}$, where
EF is the Fermi energy and $\ensuremath{\gamma}$ is the dimensionless interaction strength. In contrast, the mixture of polarized fermions and bosons in an external field exhibits square-root field-dependent magnetization in the vicinities of
H=0 and the critical value $H={H}_{c}^{M}\ensuremath{\approx}\frac{16}{\ensuremath{\gamma}}{E}_{F}$. We find that a pure boson phase occurs in the absence of the external field, fully polarized fermions and bosons coexist for
0<H<HcM, and a fully polarized fermion phase occurs for $H\ensuremath{\geqslant}{H}_{c}^{M}$. This phase diagram for the Bose-Fermi mixture is reminiscent of weakly attractive fermions with population imbalance, where the interacting fermions with opposite spins form singlet pairs.
We consider a mixture of two-component Fermi gases at low temperature. The density profile of this degenerate Fermi gas is calculated under the semiclassical approximation. The results show that the fermion-fermion interactions make a large correction to the density profile at low temperature. The phase separation of such a mixture is also discussed for both attractive and repulsive interatomic interactions, and the numerical calculations demonstrate the existance of a stable temperature region T c1 < T < T c2 for the mixture. In addition, we give the critical temperature of the BCS-type transition in this system beyond the semiclassical approximation.
We study the stability of a Bose-Fermi system loaded into an array of coupled one-dimensional (1D) ``tubes,'' where bosons and fermions experience different dimensions: Bosons are heavy and strongly localized in the 1D tubes, whereas fermions are light and can hop between the tubes. Using the
174Yb-
6Li system as a reference, we obtain the equilibrium phase diagram. We find that, for both attractive and repulsive interspecies interaction, the exact treatment of 1D bosons via the Bethe ansatz implies that the transitions between pure fermion and any phase with a finite density of bosons can only be first order and never continuous, resulting in phase separation in density space. In contrast, the order of the transition between the pure boson and the mixed phase can either be second or first order depending on whether fermions are allowed to hop between the tubes or they also are strictly confined in 1D. We discuss the implications of our findings for current experiments on
174Yb-
6Li mixtures as well as Fermi-Fermi mixtures of light and heavy atoms in a mixed-dimensional optical-lattice system.
A recent experiment at the European Laboratory for Non-Linear Spectroscopy (LENS) on a three-dimensional (3D) Fermi gas has reported a negative effective mass (
m∗<0) for Fermi polarons in the strongly repulsive regime. There naturally arises a question of whether the negative
m∗ is a precursor of the instability towards phase separation (or itinerant ferromagnetism). In this paper, we make use of the exact solutions to study the ground state and excitation properties of repulsive Fermi polarons in one dimension, which also can exhibit a negative
m∗ in the super-Tonks-Girardeau regime. By analyzing the total spin, quasimomentum distribution, and pair correlations, we conclude that the negative
m∗ is irrelevant to the instability towards ferromagnetism or phase separation but rather an intrinsic feature of collective excitations for fermions in the strongly repulsive regime. Surprisingly, for large and negative
m∗, such an excitation is accompanied with a spin-density modulation when the majority fermions move closer to the impurity rather than being repelled far away, contrary to the picture of phase separation. These results shed light on the recent observation of negative
m∗ in the 3D repulsive Fermi polarons.
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.