ENGLISH ABSTRACT: We present a theoretical approach that allows for the description of trapped Bose-Fermi mixtures with a tunable interspecies interaction in the vicinity of a Feshbach resonance magnetic field.The many-body physics of the system is treated at equilibrium using the well-established mean-field and local density approximations. This reduces the physics locally to that of a homogeneous system. We observe a rich local phase structure exhibiting both first and second order phase transitions between the normal and BEC phases. We also consider the global properties of the mixture at a fixed number of particles and investigate how the density profiles and the populations of the various particle species depend on the detuning and trap profile.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: We present a theoretical approach that allows for the description of trapped Bose-Fermi mixtures with a tunable interspecies interaction in the vicinity of a Feshbach resonance magnetic field.The many-body physics of the system is treated at equilibrium using the well-established mean-field and local density approximations. This reduces the physics locally to that of a homogeneous system. We observe a rich local phase structure exhibiting both first and second order phase transitions between the normal and BEC phases. We also consider the global properties of the mixture at a fixed number of particles and investigate how the density profiles and the populations of the various particle species depend on the detuning and trap profile.
This thesis summarizes our study on the properties of ultracold Fermions near a Feshbach resonance. The Feshbach resonance allows for a continuous tuning of the interaction strength between the atoms. With this tunability, many properties predicted for the BCS-BEC crossover region in solids can be shown to exist in this ultracold Fermi gas. With the highly controllable parameters and the clean environment in the experiments, the study of the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) to Bose-Einstein Condensation (BEC) crossover in ultracold Fermions provides valuable insights to the strongly interacting crossover region, which has never been achieved before in solids. We first examine the properties of 6 Li and 40 K gases. We find that in the unitary region the properties of the system do not depend on the atom species: outside the unitary region, the properties of the system do depend on the scattering properties of the different atom species. We study the dynamics of the ultracold Fermions in the crossover region in response to the variations in the external magnetic field. We find that the response depends on the time scale and the amplitude of the variations; which is in qualitative agreement with the experimental observations. We derive a set of dynamic mean-field equations for a Fermi gas in an arbitrary potential trap near a wide Feshbach resonance. The equations are more general than the local density approximation (LDA), and less demanding computationally as the Bogoliubov-de-Gennes (BdG) equation. We then analyze the solubility of the equations, as well as solve a simplified version of the equations for illustration and for self-consistency check on the assumptions made during the derivation. We systematically study the possible phases for a trapped Fermi gas with population imbalance near a Feshbach resonance. Our results agree qualitatively well with the recent experimental results, and predict the existence of two exotic non-BCS superfluid phases for the strongly interacting gas with population unbalance: the Breached Pair (BP) phase and the Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) phase. Finally, to guide the experimental efforts in the search of new quantum phases, we propose a detection scheme for the possible exotic phases.
In the wake of successful experiments in Fermi condensates, experimental attention is broadening to include resonant interactions in degenerate Bose-Fermi mixtures. In this thesis we wish to study the equilibrium properties of the fermionic molecules that can be created in such a mixture. To this end, we first discuss the two body properties of the system, and introduce the model Hamiltonian we use to describe the resonant physics, highlighting its virtues, as well as its limitations. We then proceed by analyzing the mean field solution of this model, by studying both the equilibrium problem, and the non-equilibrium equations of motion, thus developing a powerful language to discuss the system. We then highlight the limitations of the mean-field approach, and develop a numerically tractable generalized version of this theory, which is able to correctly describe the two-body properties of the system in the low-density limit. Finally, we study the properties of the system using this generalized mean-field theory, by first analyzing the two-body scattering matrix in the many-body environment, assessing its complex poles in order to understand the stability properties of the Feshbach molecules in the gas. Secondly we solve the equilibrium equations self-consistently, to study the molecular populations and density distributions at equilibrium, as a function of external bias magnetic field.
We investigate strong-coupling effects on the superfluid phase transition in a gas of Fermi atoms with a Feshbach resonance. The Feshbach resonance describes a composite quasiboson that can give rise to an additional pairing interaction between the Fermi atoms. This attractive interaction becomes stronger as the threshold energy $2\ensuremath{\nu}$ of the Feshbach resonance two-particle bound state is lowered. In a recent paper, we showed that in the uniform Fermi gas, this tunable pairing interaction naturally leads to a crossover from a BCS state to a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of the Nozi\`eres and Schmitt-Rink kind, in which the BCS-type superfluid phase transition continuously changes into the BEC type as the threshold energy is decreased. In this paper, we extend our previous work by including the effect of a harmonic trap potential, treated within the local-density approximation. We also give results for both weak and strong coupling to the Feshbach resonance. We show that the BCS-BEC crossover phenomenon strongly modifies the shape of the atomic density profile at the superfluid phase-transition temperature Tc, reflecting the change of the dominant particles going from Fermi atoms to composite bosons. In the BEC regime, these composite bosons are shown to first appear well above Tc. We also discuss the ``phase diagram'' above Tc as a function of the tunable threshold energy $2\ensuremath{\nu}.$ We introduce a characteristic temperature ${T}^{*}(2\ensuremath{\nu})$ describing the effective crossover in the normal phase from a Fermi gas of atoms to a gas of stable molecules.
In this Rapid Communication a generalization of the BEC-BCS crossover theory to a multicomponent superfluid is presented by studying a three-species mixture of Fermi gas across two Feshbach resonances. At the BEC side of resonances, two kinds of molecules are stable which gives rise to a two-component Bose condensate. This two-component superfluid state can be experimentally identified from the radio-frequency spectroscopy, density profile, and short noise measurements. As approaching the BCS side of resonances, the superfluidity will break down at some point and yield a first-order quantum phase transition to normal state, due to the mismatch of three Fermi surfaces. Phase separation instability will occur around the critical regime.
We investigate trapped resonant fermions with unequal populations within the local density approximation above the superfluid transition temperature. By tuning the attractive interaction between fermions via Feshbach resonance, the system evolves from weakly interacting fermi gas to strongly interacting fermi gas, and finally becomes a Bose-Fermi mixture. The density profiles of fermions are examined and compared with experiments. We also point out the simple relationships between the local density, the axial density, and the gas pressure within the local density approximation.
We investigate the ground-state properties of two-component Bose gases confined in one-dimensional harmonic traps in the scheme of density-functional theory. The density-functional calculations employ a Bethe-ansatz-based local-density approximation for the correlation energy, which accounts for the correlation effect properly from the weakly interacting regime to the strongly interacting regime. For the binary Bose mixture with spin-independent interaction, the homogeneous reference system is exactly solvable by the Bethe-ansatz method. Within the local-density approximation, we determine the density distribution of each component and study its evolution from Bose distributions to Fermi-like distribution with the increase in interaction. For the binary mixture of Tonks-Girardeau gases with a tunable interspecies repulsion, with a generalized Bose-Fermi transformation we show that the Bose mixture can be mapped into a two-component Fermi gas, which corresponds to exact soluble Yang-Gaudin model for the homogeneous system. Based on the ground-state energy function of the Yang-Gaudin model, the ground-state density distributions are calculated for various interspecies interactions. It is shown that with the increase in interspecies interaction, the system exhibits composite-fermionization crossover.