The nature of strongly interacting Fermi gases and magnetism is one of the most important and studied topics in condensed-matter physics. Still, there are many open questions. A central issue is under what circumstances strong short-range repulsive interactions are enough to drive magnetic correlations. Recent progress in the field of cold atomic gases allows one to address this question in very clean systems where both particle numbers, interactions and dimensionality can be tuned. Here we study fermionic few-body systems in a one dimensional harmonic trap using a new rapidly converging effective-interaction technique, plus a novel analytical approach. This allows us to calculate the properties of a single spin-down atom interacting with a number of spin-up particles, a case of much recent experimental interest. Our findings indicate that, in the strongly interacting limit, spin-up and spin-down particles want to separate in the trap, which we interpret as a microscopic precursor of one-dimensional ferromagnetism in imbalanced systems. Our predictions are directly addressable in current experiments on ultracold atomic few-body systems.
The nature of strongly interacting Fermi gases and magnetism is one of the most important and studied topics in condensed-matter physics. Still, there are many open questions. A central issue is under what circumstances strong short-range repulsive interactions are enough to drive magnetic correlations. Recent progress in the field of cold atomic gases allows one to address this question in very clean systems where both particle numbers, interactions and dimensionality can be tuned. Here we study fermionic few-body systems in a one dimensional harmonic trap using a new rapidly converging effective-interaction technique, plus a novel analytical approach. This allows us to calculate the properties of a single spin-down atom interacting with a number of spin-up particles, a case of much recent experimental interest. Our findings indicate that, in the strongly interacting limit, spin-up and spin-down particles want to separate in the trap, which we interpret as a microscopic precursor of one-dimensional ferromagnetism in imbalanced systems. Our predictions are directly addressable in current experiments on ultracold atomic few-body systems.
Using a second-order quantum virial expansion, we theoretically study the high-temperature thermodynamics of spin-polarized Fermi gases with
p-wave interaction confined in two-dimensional harmonic traps. The second virial coefficient is calculated based on the energy spectrum of two harmonically trapped fermions. We find that the two-body spectrum can correctly be evaluated only when the
p-wave effective range is properly considered, which is referred to as the well-known Wigner's bound. According to the quantum virial expansion, the high-temperature thermodynamics of the system is then discussed based on the two-body solutions. In addition, we investigate the high-temperature behavior of
p-wave contacts in harmonic traps within the quantum virial expansion, which characterize a set of universal relations of strongly interacting spin-polarized Fermi gases. Our results can provide an accurate benchmark at high temperature for future numerical simulations as well as high-precision thermodynamic measurements of harmonically trapped spin-polarized Fermi gases in two dimensions.