We analyze the scattering rate of an impurity atom in a Fermi sea as a function of momentum and temperature in the BCS-BEC crossover. The cross section is calculated using a microscopic multichannel theory for the Feshbach resonance scattering, including finite range and medium effects. We show that pair correlations significantly increase the cross section for strong interactions close to the unitarity regime. They give rise to a molecule pole of the cross section at negative energy on the BEC side of the resonance, which smoothly evolves into a resonance at positive scattering energy with a nonzero imaginary part on the BCS side. The resonance is the analog of superfluid pairing for the corresponding population balanced system. Using Fermi liquid theory, we show that the low temperature scattering rate of the impurity atom is significantly increased due to these pair correlations for low momenta. We demonstrate that finite range and mass imbalance effects are significant for the experimentally relevant $^{6}\mathrm{Li}\ensuremath{-}^{40}\mathrm{K}$ mixture, and we finally discuss how the scattering rate can be measured using radio-frequency spectroscopy and Bose-Fermi mixtures.
We analyze the scattering rate of an impurity atom in a Fermi sea as a function of momentum and temperature in the BCS-BEC crossover. The cross section is calculated using a microscopic multichannel theory for the Feshbach resonance scattering, including finite range and medium effects. We show that pair correlations significantly increase the cross section for strong interactions close to the unitarity regime. They give rise to a molecule pole of the cross section at negative energy on the BEC side of the resonance, which smoothly evolves into a resonance at positive scattering energy with a nonzero imaginary part on the BCS side. The resonance is the analog of superfluid pairing for the corresponding population balanced system. Using Fermi liquid theory, we show that the low temperature scattering rate of the impurity atom is significantly increased due to these pair correlations for low momenta. We demonstrate that finite range and mass imbalance effects are significant for the experimentally relevant 6Li\ensuremath−40K mixture, and we finally discuss how the scattering rate can be measured using radio-frequency spectroscopy and Bose-Fermi mixtures.
We investigate the zero-temperature quasiparticle properties of a mobile impurity immersed in a strongly interacting Fermi superfluid at the crossover from a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) to a Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superfluid, by using a many-body T-matrix approach that excludes Efimov trimer bound states. Termed the BEC-BCS crossover polaron, or crossover polaron in short, this quasiparticle couples to elementary excitations of a many-body background and therefore could provide a useful probe of the underlying strongly interacting Fermi superfluid. Due to the existence of a significant pairing gap $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}$, we find that the repulsive polaron branch becomes less well defined. In contrast, the attractive polaron branch is protected by the pairing gap and becomes more robust at finite momentum. It remains as a delta-function peak in the impurity spectral function below a threshold $2\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}$. Above the threshold, the attractive polaron enters the particle-hole continuum and starts to get damped. We predict the polaron energy, residue, and effective mass for realistic Bose-Fermi mixtures, where the minority bosonic atoms play the role of impurity. These results are practically useful for future cold-atom experiments on crossover polarons.
We present a systematic investigation of the effects of ``nonmagnetic'' impurities on the s-wave BCS-BEC crossover in atomic Fermi gases within a pairing fluctuation theory. Both pairing and impurity scattering T matrices are treated self-consistently at the same time. While the system is less sensitive to impurity scattering in the Born limit, for strong impurity scatterers, both the frequency and the gap function are highly renormalized, leading to significant suppression of the superfluid Tc, the order parameter, and the superfluid density. We also find the formation of impurity bands and smearing of coherence peak in the fermion density of states, leading to a spectrum weight transfer and finite lifetime of Bogoliubov quasiparticles. In the BCS regime, the superfluidity may be readily destroyed by the impurity of high density, leading to a superfluid-insulator quantum phase transition at zero temperature. In comparison, the superfluidity in unitary and BEC regimes is relatively more robust.
Observation of the density effect on the closed-channel fraction in a 6Li superfluid
Atomic Fermi gases provide an ideal platform for studying the pairing and superfluid physics, using a Feshbach resonance between closed channel molecular states and open channel scattering states. Of particular interest is the strongly interacting regime. We show that the closed-channel fraction Z provides an effective probe for the important many-body interacting effects, especially through its density dependence, which is absent from two-body theoretical predictions. Here we measure Z as a function of interaction strength and the Fermi temperature TF in a trapped 6Li superfluid throughout the entire BCS--BEC crossover. Away from the deep BEC regime, the fraction Z is sensitive to TF. In particular, our data show Z∝TFα with α=1/2 at unitarity, in quantitative agreement with calculations of a two-channel pairing fluctuation theory, and α increases rapidly into the BCS regime, reflecting many-body interaction effects as predicted.
We employ radio-frequency spectroscopy to investigate a polarized spin mixture of ultracold ^{6}Li atoms close to a broad Feshbach scattering resonance. Focusing on the regime of strong repulsive interactions, we observe well-defined coherent quasiparticles even for unitarity-limited interactions. We characterize the many-body system by extracting the key properties of repulsive Fermi polarons: the energy E_{+}, the effective mass m^{*}, the residue Z, and the decay rate Γ. Above a critical interaction, E_{+} is found to exceed the Fermi energy of the bath, while m^{*} diverges and even turns negative, thereby indicating that the repulsive Fermi liquid state becomes energetically and thermodynamically unstable.
We consider ultracold imbalanced Fermi gases with strong attractive interactions, for which Cooper-pair formation plays an important role. The two-component mixtures consist either of identical fermionic atoms in two different hyperfine states, or of two different atomic species. In both cases, the number of atoms for each component is allowed to be different, leading to a spin imbalance or a polarization. In the second case, the two different species also give rise to a mass imbalance for the particles. Imbalanced Fermi mixtures play a fundamental role in condensed-matter, nuclear and astroparticle physics. Experimentally, the atomic mixtures are made strongly interacting with the use of two-channel Feshbach resonances. We start out by treating these in more detail. We review the relevant scattering theory, and apply it to the well-studied case of resonant s-wave collisions with zero angular momentum. Furthermore, we discuss the less-studied case of p-wave collisions with nonzero angular momentum, and the inhomogeneous case due to a trapping potential. Having discussed the two-body physics, we turn to the many-body physics. The pioneering experimental studies of Cooper pairing in lithium-6 mixtures with a spin imbalance were performed by Zwierlein et al. [Science 311, 492 (2006)] and Partridge et al. [Science 311, 503 (2006)]. We study the mean-field theory for the polarized Fermi mixture to obtain a qualitative understanding of these experiments. In the unitarity limit, where the scattering length of the interatomic interaction diverges, the theory gives rise to two exotic superfluid phases that are absent in the balanced mixture. These are the gapless superfluid Sarma phase and the phase-separated phase. By using renormalization group techniques to account for the effects of strong interactions, we obtain also quantitative agreement with Monte-Carlo calculations and experiments. We then generalize our knowledge of the solely spin-imbalanced mixture to the mass-imbalanced case, where in particular the mixture consisting of lithium-6 and potassium-40 is experimentally promising. We study the mean-field phase diagram for this mixture in the unitarity limit, where we not only find phase separation and Sarma superfluidity, but also a Lifshitz point. The latter signals an instability towards a supersolid phase. We also include the effects of fluctuations, which do not alter the topology of the phase diagram. However, fluctuation effects lower the critical temperatures with an experimentally relevant factor of three. Finally, we study superfluidity in a fully polarized gas of potassium-40 atoms near a p-wave Feshbach resonance. In particular, we consider coherent Josephson oscillations between the superfluid components in the two channels of the resonance, whose frequencies contain a clear signature of the quantum phase transition that occurs as a function of applied magnetic field.
We investigate strong-coupling superfluidity in a uniform two-component gas of ultracold Fermi atoms attractively interacting via quasimolecular bosons associated with a Feshbach resonance. This interaction is tunable by the threshold energy $2\ensuremath{\nu}$ of the Feshbach resonance, becoming large as $2\ensuremath{\nu}$ is decreased (relative to $2{\ensuremath{\varepsilon}}_{\mathrm{F}},$ where ${\ensuremath{\varepsilon}}_{\mathrm{F}}$ is the Fermi energy of one component). In recent work, we showed that the enhancement of this tunable pairing interaction naturally leads to the BCS-BEC (Bose-Einstein condensation) crossover, where the character of the superfluid phase transition changes from the BCS type to a BEC of composite bosons consisting of preformed Cooper-pairs and Feshbach-induced molecules. In this paper, we extend our previous work and study both the quasiparticles and the collective dynamics of the superfluid phase below the phase-transition temperature Tc, limiting ourselves to a uniform gas. We show how the superfluid order parameter changes from the Cooper-pair amplitude $\ensuremath{\Delta}$ to the square root of the number of condensed molecules $({\ensuremath{\varphi}}_{\mathrm{m}})$ associated with the Feshbach resonance, as the threshold energy $2\ensuremath{\nu}$ is lowered. In the intermediate coupling regime, the superfluidity is shown to be characterized by an order parameter consisting of a superposition of $\ensuremath{\Delta}$ and ${\ensuremath{\varphi}}_{\mathrm{m}}.$ We also discuss the Goldstone mode associated with superfluidity, and show how its character smoothly changes from the Anderson-Bogoliubov phonon in the BCS regime to the Bogoliubov phonon in the BEC regime in the BCS-BEC crossover. The velocity of this Goldstone phonon mode is shown to strongly depend on the value of $2\ensuremath{\nu}.$ We also show that this Goldstone mode appears as a resonance in the spectrum of the density-density correlation function, which is experimentally accessible.