We investigate the phase diagram of a two-component repulsive Fermi gas at T=0 by means of quantum Monte Carlo simulations. Both purely repulsive and resonant attractive model potentials are considered in order to analyze the limits of the universal regime where the details of interatomic forces can be neglected. The equation of state of both balanced and unbalanced systems is calculated as a function of the interaction strength and the critical density for the onset of ferromagnetism is determined. The energy of the strongly polarized gas is calculated and parametrized in terms of the physical properties of repulsive polarons, which are relevant for the stability of the fully ferromagnetic state. Finally, we analyze the phase diagram in the interaction-polarization plane under the assumption that only phases with homogeneous magnetization can be produced.
We study the polaron problem of an impurity immersed in a dissipative spin-orbit coupled Fermi gas via a non-self-consistent T -matrix method. We first propose an experimental scheme to realize a spin-orbit coupled Fermi bath with dissipation, and show that such a system can be described by a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian that contains an imaginary spin-flip term and an imaginary constant shift term. We find that the non-Hermiticity will change the single-particle dispersion of the bath gas, and modify the properties of attractive and repulsive polarons such as energy, quasi-particle residue, effective mass, and decay rate. We also investigate the Thouless criteria corresponding to the instability of the polaron-molecule transition, which suggests a molecule state is more facilitated with stronger bath dissipation. Finally, we consider the case with finite impurity density and calculate the interaction between polarons. Our result extends the study of polaron physics to non-Hermitian systems and may be realized in future experiments.
It is generally believed that a dilute spin-
21 Fermi gas with repulsive interactions can undergo a ferromagnetic phase transition to a spin-polarized state at a critical gas parameter
(kFa)c. Previous theoretical predictions of the ferromagnetic phase transition have been based on the perturbation theory, which treats the gas parameter as a small number. On the other hand, Belitz, Kirkpatrick, and Vojta (BKV) have argued that the phase transition in clean itinerant ferromagnets is generically of first order at low temperatures, due to the correlation effects that lead to a nonanalytic term in the free energy. The second-order perturbation theory predicts a first-order phase transition at
(kFa)c=1.054, consistent with the BKV argument. However, since the critical gas parameter is expected to be of order
O(1), perturbative predictions may be unreliable. In this paper we study the nonperturbative effects on the ferromagnetic phase transition by summing the particle-particle ladder diagrams to all orders in the gas parameter. We consider a universal repulsive Fermi gas where the effective range effects can be neglected, which can be realized in a two-component Fermi gas of
6Li atoms by using a nonadiabatic field switch to the upper branch of a Feshbach resonance with a positive
s-wave scattering length. Our theory predicts a second-order phase transition, which indicates that ferromagnetic transition in dilute Fermi gases is possibly a counterexample to the BKV argument. The predicted critical gas parameter
(kFa)c=0.858 is in good agreement with the recent quantum Monte Carlo result
(kFa)c=0.86 for a nearly zero-range potential [S. Pilati et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 030405 (2010)]. We also compare the spin susceptibility with the quantum Monte Carlo result and find good agreement.
The Stoner model predicts that a two-component Fermi gas at increasing repulsive interactions undergoes a ferromagnetic transition. Using the random-phase approximation we study the dynamical properties of the interacting Fermi gas. For an atomic Fermi gas under harmonic confinement we show that the transverse (spin-flip) dynamical susceptibility displays a clear signature of the ferromagnetic phase in a magnon peak emerging from the Stoner particle-hole continuum. The dynamical spin susceptibilities could be experimentally explored via spin-dependent Bragg spectroscopy.
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 study the attractive and repulsive two-component Fermi gas with spin imbalance in two dimensions. Using a generalized
T-matrix approximation, we examine the thermodynamic properties of both attractive and repulsive contact interacting Fermi gases. The interaction strength, which is characterized by the bound state energy
Eb=ℏ2/ma2d2 in vacuum, can be adjusted through a Feshbach resonance. We calculate the interaction energy, compressibility and spin susceptibility of the two branches of the Fermi gas. For the repulsive branch, we also find a critical strength of interaction
a2d(c) above which this metastable thermodynamic state becomes unstable. This critical value depends on the temperature and the spin imbalance (the "magnetization") of the system.