In this paper we present an overview of radio frequency (RF) spectroscopy in the atomic Fermi superfluids. An ultimate goal is to suggest new directions in the cold gas research agenda from the condensed matter perspective.Our focus is on the experimental and theoretical literature of cold gases and photoemission spectroscopy of the cuprates particularly as it pertains to areas of overlap. This paper contains a systematic overview of the theory of RF spectroscopy, both momentum integrated and momentum resolved. We discuss the effects of traps, population imbalance, final state interactions over the entire range of temperatures and compare theory and experiment. We show that this broad range of phenomena can be accomodated within the BCS-Leggett description of BCS-BEC crossover and that this scheme also captures some of the central observations in photoemission experiments in the cuprates. In this last context, we note that the key themes which have emerged in cuprate photoemission studies involve characterization of the fermionic self energy, of the pseudogap and of the effects of superconducting coherence (in passing from above to below the superfluid transition temperature,
Tc).These issues have a counterpart in the cold Fermi gases and it would be most useful in future to use these atomic systems to address these and the more sweeping question of how to describe that anomalous superfluid phase which forms in the presence of a normal state excitation gap.
This thesis presents experiments investigating the
phase diagram of ultracold atomic Fermi gases using radio-frequency
spectroscopy. The tunability of many experimental parameters
including the temperature, the interparticle interaction strength
and the relative population of different Fermions allows to access
very different physical regimes. Radio-frequency spectroscopy has
been developed into an ideal tool to probe correlations between
particles in these different phases. In particular, radio-frequency
spectroscopy of highly population imbalanced atomic Fermi systems
gives access to the impurity problem: A single Fermion, or Boson,
immersed in a sea of Fermions constitutes a polaron, which can be
described by Landau's Fermi liquid theory. A critical interaction
strength can be identified separating the regime of a fermionic
polaron and a bosonic polaron. Radio-frequency spectroscopy of the
polarized superfluid phase allows an accurate measure of the
superfluid gap [Delta] and allows to identify the importance of
Hartree Mean-field energies. Furthermore, it is shown how these
different physical regimes are connected.
We propose a Bragg spectroscopy experiment to measure the onset of superfluid pairing in ultracold trapped Fermi gases. In particular, we study two-component Fermi gases in the weak coupling BCS and Bose Einstein condensation limits as well as in the strong coupling unitarity limit. The low-temperature Bragg spectrum exhibits a gap directly related to the pair-breaking energy. Furthermore, the Bragg spectrum has a large maximum just below the critical temperature when the gas is superfluid in the BCS limit. In the unitarity regime, we show how the pseudogap in the normal phase leads to a significant suppression of the low-frequency Bragg spectrum.