arXiv:2110.09496 · Physical Review A
BCS-BEC crossover of atomic Fermi superfluid in a spherical bubble trap
Yan He, Hao Guo, Chih-Chun Chien
Abstract
We present a theory of a two-component atomic Fermi gas with tunable attractive contact interactions on a spherical shell going through the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS)--Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) crossover, inspired by the realizations of spherical bubble traps for ultracold atoms in microgravity. The derivation follows the BCS-Leggett theory to obtain the gap and number equations. The BCS-BEC crossover can be induced by tuning the interaction, and the properly normalized gap and chemical potential exhibit universal behavior regardless of the planar or spherical geometry. Nevertheless, the spherical-shell geometry introduces another way of inducing the crossover by the curvature. The curvature-induced BCS-BEC crossover is made possible by fixing the particle number and interaction strength while shrinking the sphere, causing a reduction to the ratio of the pairing and kinetic energies and pushing the system toward the BCS limit. The saturation of the superfluid density further confirms that the ground state is a Fermi superfluid.