Collective modes in normal and superfluid Fermi systems

F. Matera, Matthias Wagner

Victor Nikolaevich Popov

Mi­chael Urban

At finite temperature, the hydrodynamic collective modes of superfluid trapped Fermi gases are coupled to the motion of the normal component, which in the BCS limit behaves like a collisionless normal Fermi gas. The coupling between the superfluid and the normal components is treated in the framework of a semiclassical transport theory for the quasiparticle-distribution function, combined with a hydrodynamic equation for the collective motion of the superfluid component. We develop a numerical test-particle method for solving these equations in the linear-response regime. As a first application we study the temperature dependence of the collective quadrupole mode of a Fermi gas in a spherical trap. The coupling between the superfluid collective motion and the quasiparticles leads to a rather strong damping of the hydrodynamic mode already at very low temperatures. At higher temperatures the spectrum has a two-peak structure, the second peak corresponding to the quadrupole mode in the normal phase.

Mi­chael Urban

There are several situations in which the collective motion of a superfluid Fermi gas is coupled to quasiparticle excitations. Quasiparticle excitations are, for example, present at finite temperature, but also at zero temperature in the case of a rotating trap. In this paper, I present a semiclassical description of such systems, where the superfluid component is described by hydrodynamics while the normal component, formed by the quasiparticles, is described by a transport equation similar to the Vlasov equation. The coupling between the two components generates a strong damping of the collective modes. As applications of the semiclassical theory, the case of a rotating trap and several collective modes (quadrupole and scissors modes) of the trapped gas are discussed.

John S. Clarke

Rashmiraj Balkrishna Prabhu