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Science

Poking at Atomic Cooper Pairs

Published Aug 4, 2000• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The recent observation of the onset of degeneracy in a Fermi gas, in which the atoms are cooled to such low temperatures that their associated de Broglie waves start to overlap, has opened up new opportunities in atomic and quantum physics. One prediction is that the interaction between Fermionic atoms can be tuned to form Cooper pairs, just as two electrons do in superconductors when they overcome their Coulombic repulsion and pair up. However, the expectedly small superconducting gap and the nature of the Fermionic system will require new techniques. Törma and Zoller propose using laser pulses to detect the superconducting ground state of the atomic Cooper pair and determine the extent of the pairing. Lasers would be used to tune and manipulate the coupling between the internal energy levels of the atoms, which would alter their interaction strength, and should result in a controllable and measurable phase transition between the superconducting and normal states. — ISO

DOI
10.1126/science.289.5480.697a

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The recent observation of the onset of degeneracy in a Fermi gas, in which the atoms are cooled to such low temperatures that their associated de Broglie waves start to overlap, has opened up new opportunities in atomic and quantum physics. One prediction is that the interaction between Fermionic atoms can be tuned to form Cooper pairs, just as two electrons do in superconductors when they overcome their Coulombic repulsion and pair up. However, the expectedly small superconducting gap and the nature of the Fermionic system will require new techniques. Törma and Zoller propose using laser pulses to detect the superconducting ground state of the atomic Cooper pair and determine the extent of the pairing. Lasers would be used to tune and manipulate the coupling between the internal energy levels of the atoms, which would alter their interaction strength, and should result in a controllable and measurable phase transition between the superconducting and normal states. — ISO
We consider a gas of trapped Cooper-paired fermionic atoms that are manipulated by laser light. The laser induces a transition from an internal state with large negative scattering length (superfluid) to one with weaker interactions (normal gas). We show that the process can be used to detect the presence of the superconducting order parameter. Also, we propose a direct way of measuring the size of the gap in the trap. The efficiency and feasibility of this probing method is investigated in detail in different physical situations.
The electron gas examined in a very thin potential tube exhibits some special kind of the excited pairs making them similar to the Cooper pairs. The coupling energy of the pair can be calculated as an amount of energy required to transform the excitation energy of a coupled pair into the one-electron excitation energy. For an extremely thin potential tube the coupling energy of the pair tends to infinity. The gas energy is unstable with respect to the pair excitation which provides a kind of gap near the Fermi level. A decisive part of the gap energy is due to the electron-electron interaction. The gap is attained on condition the length of a thin potential box exceeds some critical value. In the next step, a coherence length in the gas is obtained. This length, combined with a critical magnetic field representing a transition from a superconducting to a normal state, allows us to calculate the penetration depth of the magnetic field for the singlet and triplet excitations. The penetration depth together with the critical magnetic field and energy gap can provide us with a critical current, as well as critical temperature for the superconducting state.
The pairing of fermionic particles is an essential ingredient of superconductivity and of the superfluidity of 3He. While such phenomena are accurately described by BCS theory in the limit of weak pairing strength, a complete understanding remains elusive when pairing strength is increased, such as in high temperature superconductors. We create ultracold gases of trapped fermionic 6Li atoms, through which we directly observe fermionic pairing. In our system, there are no impurities whatsoever, and parameters such as the number and temperature of the trapped atoms are precisely and independently controlled. In addition, a Feshbach resonance enables the continuous tuning of interaction strength and sign between the paired atoms. This control allows us to observe the smooth crossover of a molecular Bose Einstein condensate (MBEC) to a superfluid of weakly interacting Cooper pairs. With these tools, we have performed several fundamental measurements of pairing in fermionic systems.\nWe use optical molecular spectroscopy to precisely measure the closed-channel contribution to the many body state of paired 6Li atoms within a broad Feshbach resonance. The magnitude of this contribution is small, and supports the concept of universality for the description of broad Feshbach resonances. Moreover, the dynamics of the excitation provide clear evidence for pairing across the BEC-BCS crossover, and for the first time, into the weakly interacting BCS regime.\nWe also prepare a polarized Fermi gas with unequal numbers of two spin states of 6Li atoms. The real-space densities of the polarized, strongly-interacting, two-component Fermi gas reveal two low temperature regimes. At the lowest temperatures, the gas separates into a phase with a uniformly paired superfluid core surrounded by a shell of normal, unpaired atoms. This phase separation is accompanied by a spatial deformation of the core. At higher temperatures, the uniformly paired core persists, though it does not deform. This temperature dependence is consistent with a tri-critical point in the phase diagram. These measurements of pairing in a polarized Fermi gas are relevant to predictions of exotic phases of quark matter and magnetized superconductors.
At sufficiently low temperatures, bosons predominantly occupy the ground state with zero energy and momentum. In addition, both superconductivity in metals and superfluidity in liquid helium-3, at sufficiently low temperatures, are associated with pairing interactions of fermions that lead to bosonic behavior. In contrast, fermions in a Fermi gas at low T populate the lowest states up to the Fermi level as a result of the Pauli exclusion principle. Beautiful experiments have been carried out on vapors of alkali atoms such as rubidium-87 that are cooled to very low temperatures by means of sophisticated experimental techniques that involve laser cooling followed by evaporative cooling.
A weak-coupling scenario wherein bosonic preformed electron pairs emerge upon cooling from two-electron correlations can explain the pseudogap phase consisting of segments where a Bogoliubov-like energy-momentum relation gapped spectrum alternates with a normal ungapped one. Bose–Einstein condensation (BEC) of preformed pairs interacting with the background fermions leads to either - or -wave-like superconducting gaps, the result being sensitive to the magnitude of the total number density of pairs at which BEC occurs and becomes possible already for a moderately anisotropic -wave pairing of fermions repelling each other via isotropic coulombic forces. The present model is compatible with the coexistence of pseudogap and of superconductivity phenomena.