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arXiv:2512.16384 · Physical Review A

Repulsive fermions and shell effects on the surface of a sphere

L. Frigato, A. Bardin, L. Salasnich

Published May 7, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1103/2jsk-6yf1

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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.
Motivated by the recent achievement of space-based Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) with ultracold alkali-metal atoms under microgravity and by the proposal of bubble traps which confine atoms on a thin shell, we investigate the BEC thermodynamics on the surface of a sphere. We determine analytically the critical temperature and the condensate fraction of a noninteracting Bose gas. Then we consider the inclusion of a zero-range interatomic potential, extending the noninteracting results at zero and finite temperature. Both in the noninteracting and interacting cases the crucial role of the finite radius of the sphere is emphasized, showing that in the limit of infinite radius one recovers the familiar two-dimensional results. We also investigate the Berezinski-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition driven by vortical configurations on the surface of the sphere, analyzing the interplay of condensation and superfluidity in this finite-size system.
We investigate the ground-state properties of a two-component attractive Fermi gas confined to a spherical surface, demonstrating how curvature and finite-size effects lead to qualitatively different behavior compared to the planar limit. In the strongly attractive regime, the system forms a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of tightly bound dimers, yielding a gap and chemical potential that approach flat-space results with leading-order geometric corrections. However, as the attraction decreases, the system crosses over into a Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) regime where the Cooper pair size becomes constrained by the sphere radius, producing pronounced deviations from flat-space behavior. We identify strong shell effects at magic particle numbers set by the single-particle spectrum, revealing the geometry-driven suppression of fermionic pairing at weak interactions. Our results highlight a fundamental interplay among geometry, quantum statistics, and interactions, motivating future experiments with shell-trapped ultracold fermions and inspiring geometry-controlled condensed matter devices.
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 examine the spin asymmetry of ground states for two-dimensional, harmonically trapped two-component gases of fermionic atoms at zero temperature with weakly repulsive short range interactions. Our main result is that, in contrast to the three-dimensional case, in two dimensions a non-trivial spin-asymmetric phase can only be caused by shell structure. A simple, qualitative description is given in terms of an approximate single particle model, comparing well to the standard results of Hartree-Fock or direct diagonalization methods.
Motivated by recent experimental advances in bubble traps which confine atoms on a thin shell, we investigate the stabilization of droplet states of a Bose-Bose mixture on a spherical surface due to quantum fluctuations. We analytically calculate the energy of a weakly interacting Bose-Bose mixture on a spherical surface with attractive interspecies and repulsive intraspecies interactions using the Bogoliubov approximation. Our findings show that the energy per particle has a minimum at a finite density in the presence of the Lee-Huang-Yang (LHY) term, which indicates the presence of liquidlike droplet state stabilized by quantum fluctuations. We also numerically solve the extended Gross-Pitaevskii equation, incorporating both bubble traps and an additional repulsive LHY correction derived from the Bogoliubov spectrum of a three-dimensional homogeneous mixture. Our calculations show that, due to the size limitations of the sphere, droplet states can only exist within specific parameter ranges. We also verify the transition between droplet states and uniform condensates in spherical confinement potentials, as well as the coexistence of the two. Our results pave the way for future exploration of quantum droplets in curved geometries with nontrivial real-space topologies.
Finite fermion systems are known to exhibit shell structure in the weakly interacting regime, as is well known from atoms, nuclei, metallic clusters, or even quantum dots in two dimensions. All these systems have in common that the particle interactions between electrons or nucleons are spatially isotropic. Dipolar quantum systems as they have been realized with ultracold gases, however, are governed by an intrinsic anisotropy of the two-body interaction that depends on the orientation of the dipoles relative to each other. Here we investigate how this interaction anisotropy modifies the shell structure in a weakly interacting two-dimensional anisotropic harmonic trap. Going beyond Hartree-Fock analysis by applying the so-called importance-truncated configuration-interaction (CI) method as well as quadratic CI with single and double substitutions, we show how the magnetostriction in the system may be counteracted upon by a deformation of the confinement.