We measure excitation spectra of an ultracold gas of fermionic (40)K atoms in the BCS-Bose-Einstein-condensation (BEC) crossover regime. The measurements are performed with a novel spectroscopy that employs a small modulation of the B field close to a Feshbach resonance to give rise to a modulation of the interaction strength. With this method we observe both a collective excitation as well as the dissociation of fermionic atom pairs in the strongly interacting regime. The excitation spectra reveal the binding energy or excitation gap for pairs in the crossover region.
A Bose-Einstein condensate of atoms, trapped in an axially symmetric harmonic potential, is considered. By averaging the spatial density along the symmetry direction over a length that preserves the aspect ratio, the system may be mapped on to a zero temperature noninteracting Fermi-like gas. The ``mock fermions'' have a state occupancy factor
(>>1) proportional to the ratio of the coherance length to the ``hard-core'' radius of the atom. The mapping reproduces the ground state properties of the condensate, and is used to estimate the vortex excitation energy analytically. The ``mock-fermion'' description predicts some novel collective excitation in the condensed phase.
We investigate the possibilities for the generation of solitons and vortices in a degenerate gas of neutral fermionic atoms. In analogy with the already experimentally demonstrated technique applied to a gaseous Bose-Einstein condensate we propose the phase engineering of a Fermi gas as a practical route to excited states with solitons and vortices. We stress that solitons and vortices appear even in a non-interacting fermionic gas. For solitons, in a system with a sufficiently large number of fermions and appropriate trap configuration, the Pauli blocking acts as the interaction between particles.