We present possible ground-state structures of two-component atomic Fermi gases with repulsive interactions in a thin spherical shell geometry by implementing a self-consistent Hartree-Fock approximation. The system exhibits a miscible-immiscible transition from a homogeneous mixture to two-chunk phase separation as the interaction strength crosses a critical value. While the critical value is relatively insensitive to population imbalance for equal-mass mixtures, it decreases with the mass ratio when mass imbalance is present. The interaction may be tuned by the two-body scattering length or the radius of the sphere, thereby allowing the system to cross the transition by varying different parameters. When the atoms on the sphere are rotating, three-chunk sandwich structures emerge in mass-imbalanced mixtures as a consequence of maximal angular momentum along the rotation axis. Some indications of geometric effects and possible experimental implications are also discussed.
We present possible ground-state structures of two-component atomic Fermi gases with repulsive interactions in a thin spherical shell geometry by implementing a self-consistent Hartree-Fock approximation. The system exhibits a miscible-immiscible transition from a homogeneous mixture to two-chunk phase separation as the interaction strength crosses a critical value. While the critical value is relatively insensitive to population imbalance for equal-mass mixtures, it decreases with the mass ratio when mass imbalance is present. The interaction may be tuned by the two-body scattering length or the radius of the sphere, thereby allowing the system to cross the transition by varying different parameters. When the atoms on the sphere are rotating, three-chunk sandwich structures emerge in mass-imbalanced mixtures as a consequence of maximal angular momentum along the rotation axis. Some indications of geometric effects and possible experimental implications are also discussed.
We study the two-component repulsive Fermi gas with imbalanced populations in one dimension. Starting from the Bethe ansatz solution we calculate analytically the phase diagram for the homogeneous system. We show that three phases appear: the balanced phase, the fully polarized phase, and the partially polarized phase. By means of the local density approximation and the equation of state for the homogeneous system we calculate the density profile for the harmonically confined case. We show that a two-shell structure appears: at the center of the cloud we find the partially polarized phase and at the edges the fully polarized one. The radii of the inner and outer shells are calculated for different values of the polarization and the coupling strength. We calculate the dependence of the magnetization on the polarization for different values of the coupling strength and we show that the susceptibility is always finite.
In recent years, ultracold atomic gases confined in curved geometries have attracted considerable theoretical interest. This is motivated by recent realizations of bubble traps in microgravity conditions, which open the possibility of investigating quantum many-body physics beyond the conventional flat-space paradigm. The theoretical interest up to now was mainly focused on Bose gases and their phenomenology, and the study of Fermi gases has been left behind. In this paper, we investigate a two-component repulsive Fermi gas constrained to the surface of a sphere at finite temperature. We first analyze the noninteracting case, showing how the intrinsic geometrical features of the spherical surface give rise to a shell structure and modify the low-temperature thermodynamics compared to the flat two-dimensional gas. Repulsive interactions are then considered through an effective path-integral approach within a Hartree-Fock mean-field approximation, enabling us to derive the grand canonical potential and to regularize the associated Matsubara summation. We then investigate the stability of the spin-balanced state and obtain the finite-temperature Stoner criterion for fermions on a sphere, highlighting the interplay between the repulsive interactions and shell effects.
Multicomponent quantum gases are ideal platforms to study fundamental phenomena arising from the mutual interaction between different constituents. Particularly, due to the repulsive interactions between two species, the system may exhibit a phase separation. We develop a mean-field-based theory for a two-component Bose mixture, which is equivalent to the Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov approximation, and derive analytical expressions for the phase boundary and miscibility. The majority of existing theories, which are valid only for weakly interacting Bose gases, predict that the phase boundary is determined by the criterion ${g}_{ab}\ensuremath{\leqslant}\sqrt{{g}_{aa}{g}_{bb}}$ (where gab is a coupling constant between the components a and b). We show that in the Bose-Einstein condensation phase ($T\ensuremath{\leqslant}{T}_{c}$) the system may remain in a stable and miscible phase also for larger values of gab, depending on the gas parameter $\ensuremath{\gamma}$ and temperature.
We consider the ground states of binary atomic boson-boson and fermion-fermion mixtures confined in one-dimensional box potentials by simulating the systems using few-body models with $\ensuremath{\delta}$-function interactions and many-body models with density-density interactions. For boson-boson mixtures with strong interspecies repulsion, both models show sandwiched structures in the presence of mass imbalance but not in the equal-mass case. The structural difference between equal-mass and mass-imbalanced systems is due to the minimization of the interaction energy and the kinetic energies from the density distortion at the hard walls and at the phase-separation interface. The mass imbalance adjusts the kinetic energies and causes the lighter species to avoid the hard walls. For fermion-fermion mixtures, few-body simulations show mass-imbalance-induced structural changes in the strong-repulsion regime, while many-body simulations show two-chunk phase separation due to the strong bulk kinetic energy. For equal-mass mixtures with strong interspecies repulsion, the few-body and many-body models predict different structures because of the different treatments of kinetic and interaction energies.
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 study the ground state of a two-component dipolar Fermi gas in a spherically symmetric harmonic trap at zero temperature. We obtain the ground state of the system with equal but opposite values of the magnetic moment on the basis of the Thomas--Fermi--von Weizs\"acker approximation. It is found that two types of phase-separated states which break the spherical symmetry emerge across the phase transition between a spin-symmetric phase and a phase-separation phase. One is an axially symmetric phase-separated state and the other is a one-dimensional alternating-spin layered state. We also study a Fermi-Fermi mixture of polarized Dy and Er atoms and show that a structural transition of phase separation can be observed in current experiments by varying the relative number of particles.