Virial expansion is widely used in cold atoms to analyze high temperature strongly correlated many-body systems. As the n-th order virial expansion coefficient can be accurately obtained by exactly solving up to n-body problems, the virial expansion offers a few-body approach to study strongly correlated many-body problems. In particular, the virial expansion has successfully been applied to unitary Fermi gas. We review recent progress of the virial expansion studies in the unitary Fermi gas, in particular the fourth order virial coefficient.
Quantum virial expansion provides an ideal tool to investigate the high-temperature properties of a strongly correlated Fermi gas. Here, we construct the virial expansion in the presence of spin-population imbalance. Up to the third order, we calculate the high-temperature free energy of a unitary Fermi gas as a function of spin imbalance, with infinitely large attractive or repulsive interactions. In the latter repulsive case, we show that there is no itinerant ferromagnetism when quantum virial expansion is applicable. We therefore estimate an upper bound for the ferromagnetic transition temperature
Tc. For a harmonically trapped Fermi gas at unitarity, we find that
(Tc)upper<TF, where
TF is the Fermi temperature at the center of the trap. Our result for the high-temperature equations of state may confront future high-precision thermodynamic measurements.