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arXiv:1509.08225 · Physical Review A

Comparison of strong-coupling theories for a two-dimensional Fermi gas

Brendan C. Mulkerin, Kristian Fenech, Paul Dyke, Chris J. Vale, Xia-Ji Liu, Hui Hu

Published Dec 29, 2015• 26 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Understanding the formation of Cooper pairs and the resulting thermodynamic properties of low-dimensional Fermi gases is an important area of research, which may help build our understanding of other low-dimensional systems, such as high-temperature superconductors. In lower dimensions, quantum fluctuations are expected to play an increasingly important role, and the reliability of strong-coupling theories becomes questionable. Here, we present a comparison of recent thermodynamic measurements and theoretical predictions from different many-body $T$-matrix theories for a two-dimensional strongly interacting Fermi gas in the normal state. We find that the fully self-consistent $T$-matrix theory provides the best description of the experimental data over a wide range of temperatures and interatomic interactions.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.92.063636

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Understanding the formation of Cooper pairs and the resulting thermodynamic properties of low-dimensional Fermi gases is an important area of research, which may help build our understanding of other low-dimensional systems, such as high-temperature superconductors. In lower dimensions, quantum fluctuations are expected to play an increasingly important role, and the reliability of strong-coupling theories becomes questionable. Here, we present a comparison of recent thermodynamic measurements and theoretical predictions from different many-body TTT-matrix theories for a two-dimensional strongly interacting Fermi gas in the normal state. We find that the fully self-consistent TTT-matrix theory provides the best description of the experimental data over a wide range of temperatures and interatomic interactions.
Strongly interacting, dilute Fermi gases exhibit a scale-invariant, universal thermodynamic behavior. This is notoriously difficult to understand theoretically because of the absence of a small interaction parameter. Here, we present a systematic comparison of theoretical predictions from different quantum many-body theories with recent experimental data of Nascimbne et al (2010 Nature 463 1057). Our comparisons have no adjustable parameters, either theoretically or experimentally. All the model approximations seem to fluctuate rather than converge on the experimental data. It turns out that a simple Gaussian pair fluctuation theory gives the best quantitative agreement, except at the critical superfluid transition region. In the normal state, we also calculate the equation of state by using a quantum cluster expansion theory and explore in detail its applicability to low temperatures. Using the accurate experimental result for the thermodynamic function S ( T ), we determine the temperature T of a trapped Fermi gas at unitarity as a function of a non-interacting temperature T i , which can be obtained by an adiabatic sweep to the free gas limit. By analyzing the recent experimental data, we find a characteristic temperature ( T / T F ) 0 =0.19±0.02 or ( T i / T F ) 0 =0.16±0.02 in a harmonic trap, below which there are deviations from normal Fermi-liquid-like behavior that may be attributed to pairing effects. Here, T F is the Fermi temperature for a trapped ideal, non-interacting Fermi gas. Our thorough comparison may shed light on the further theoretical development of strongly interacting fermions.
Interacting Fermi systems in the strongly correlated regime play a fundamental role in many areas of physics and are of particular interest to the condensed matter community. Though weakly interacting fermions are understood, strongly correlated fermions are difficult to describe theoretically as there is no small interaction parameter to expand about. Existing strong-coupling theories rely heavily on the so-called many-body TTT-matrix approximation that sums ladder-type Feynman diagrams. Here, by acknowledging the fact that the effective interparticle interaction (i.e., the vertex function) becomes smaller above three dimensions, we propose an alternative way to reorganize Feynman diagrams and develop a theoretical framework for interacting Fermi gases beyond the ladder approximation. As an application, we solve the equation of state for three- and two-dimensional strongly interacting fermions and find excellent agreement with experimental [M. J. H. Ku et al., Science 335, 563 (2012)] and other theoretical results above temperatures of 0.5TF0.5{T}_{F}0.5TF​.
The study of strongly correlated quantum gases in two dimensions has important ramifications for understanding many intriguing phenomena in solid materials, such as high-Tc{T}_{c}Tc​ superconductivity and the fractional quantum-Hall effect. However, theoretical methods are plagued by the existence of significant quantum fluctuations. Here, we present two- and three-body exact solutions for both fermions and bosons trapped in a two-dimensional harmonic potential with an arbitrary sss-wave scattering length. These few-particle solutions link in a natural way to the high-temperature properties of many-particle systems via a quantum virial expansion. As a concrete example, using the energy spectrum of few fermions, we calculate the second and third virial coefficients of a strongly interacting Fermi gas in two dimensions, and consequently investigate its high-temperature thermodynamics. Our thermodynamic results may be useful for ongoing experiments on two-dimensional Fermi gases. These exact results also provide an unbiased benchmark for quantum Monte Carlo simulations of two-dimensional Fermi gases at high temperatures.
Understanding the origins of unconventional superconductivity has been a major focus of condensed matter physics for many decades. While many questions remain unanswered, experiments have found that the systems with the highest critical temperatures tend to be layered materials where superconductivity occurs in two-dimensional (2D) structures. However, to what extent the remarkable stability of these strongly correlated 2D superfluids is related to their reduced dimensionality is still an open question. In this work, we use dilute gases of ultracold fermionic atoms as a model system to directly observe the influence of dimensionality on strongly interacting fermionic superfluids. We achieve this by measuring the superfluid gap of a strongly correlated quasi-2D Fermi gas over a wide range of interaction strengths and comparing the results to recent measurements in 3D Fermi gases. We find that the superfluid gap follows the same universal function of the interaction strength in both systems, which suggests that there is no inherent difference in the stability of fermionic superfluidity between two- and three-dimensional quantum gases. Finally, we compare our data to results from solid state systems and find a similar relation between the interaction strength and the gap for a wide range of two- and three-dimensional superconductors.
Ultracold atomic Fermi gases have been a popular topic of research, with attention being paid recently to two-dimensional (2D) gases. In this work, we perform T=0T=0T=0 ab initio diffusion Monte Carlo calculations for a strongly interacting two-component Fermi gas confined to two dimensions. We first go over finite-size systems and the connection to the thermodynamic limit. After that, we illustrate pertinent 2D scattering physics and properties of the wave function. We then show energy results for the strong-coupling crossover, in between the Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) and Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) regimes. Our energy results for the BEC-BCS crossover are parametrized to produce an equation of state, which is used to determine Tan's contact. We carry out a detailed comparison with other microscopic results. Finally, we calculate the pairing gap for a range of interaction strengths in the strong coupling regime, following from variationally optimized many-body wave functions.
We theoretically investigate strong-coupling properties of an attractively interacting Fermi atomic gas, where the Cooper-pair formation occurs between atoms belonging to different dimensional bands. Including pairing fluctuations within the framework of the self-consistent TTT-matrix approximation (SCTMA), we examine how the BCS-type superfluid phase transition temperature TcT_\mathrm{c}Tc​ varies as one moves from the 3D-3D to the 2D-3D system, in the wide parameter region with respect to the strength of the pairing interaction. In the 2D-3D limit, we find that, while the mean-field BCS theory predicts Tc>0T_\mathrm{c}>0Tc​>0 in the strong-coupling regime, TcT_\mathrm{c}Tc​ is remarkably suppressed down to zero by pairing fluctuations that are strongly enhanced by the mixed-dimensionality of the system. As the origin of this, we clarify that the lower-dimensional (2D) component dominates the superfluid instability, so that the vanishing TcT_\mathrm{c}Tc​ is the same phenomenon as that in the 2D-2D case. We also point out that this can already be seen in the mean-field level, when one examines the propagation of the Goldstone mode. On the other hand, we find that the pseudogap phenomenon, which is known as a precursor of Cooper-pair formation, exhibits a 3D character of the 2D-3D system. These results indicate that the dimensionality of a strongly interacting Fermi gas depends on what we observe.