This chapter presents various methods specific for fermionic systems and Fermi–Bose mixtures. It starts by discussing a lattice version of the BCS theory and then reviews BCS-BEC crossover theory for trapped Fermi gases close to the Feshbach resonance. The chapter analyses Fermi Hubbard models in the strongly correlated regime and t-J limit, and introduces the Gutzwiller projection method and the slave boson approach. It discusses in detail, in particular in the context of Fermi-Bose mixtures, effective low energy Hamiltonians and their derivation.
This chapter presents various methods specific for fermionic systems and Fermi–Bose mixtures. It starts by discussing a lattice version of the BCS theory and then reviews BCS-BEC crossover theory for trapped Fermi gases close to the Feshbach resonance. The chapter analyses Fermi Hubbard models in the strongly correlated regime and t-J limit, and introduces the Gutzwiller projection method and the slave boson approach. It discusses in detail, in particular in the context of Fermi-Bose mixtures, effective low energy Hamiltonians and their derivation.
The study of ultracold trapped fermionic gases is a rapidly exploding subject [1-10] which is defining new directions in condensed matter and atomic physics. It has also captured the attention of physicists who study color superconducting quark matter as well as nuclear matter [11-13]. Indeed, it is hard, in recent times, to find a subfield of physics which appeals this broadly to the research community. As we come to understand the gases, experimentalists will move to address fermionic atoms in optical lattices; this will provide important insight to condensed matter physicists as analogue systems for “solving ” intractable many body problems. What makes these gases (and lattices) so important is their remarkable tunability and controllability. Using a Feshbach resonance, one can tune the attractive two-body interaction from weak to strong, and thereby make a smooth crossover from a BCS superfluid to a Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) [14, 15]. Not only does this allow high transition temperatures Tc (relative to the Fermi energy EF) but it may also provide insights into the high temperature cuprate superconductivity [16-19]. Furthermore, one can tune the population of the two spin states, essentially at will, in this way, allowing exploration [20-22] of exotic polarized phases such as the FFLO [23-25] superfluids, of interest to condensed matter, nuclear and particle physicists. One will be able to tune the lattice parameters such as bandwidth, on-site repulsion, even random disorder, etc and thereby study the famous, and as yet, unsolved Hubbard model Hamiltonian. This paper will concentrate on those issues relating to the effects which are of current interest to experimentalists. In particular, we will study BCS-BEC crossover in atomic Fermi gases, looking at a wide range of different experiments. Our group has been principally interested in the effects of finite temperature [26, 17, 18] and in this review, we will discuss how temperature T enters into the standard crossover theory, and how temperature can be measured, and how temc○
To study the behavior of atomic Fermi gases in the vicinity of Feshbach resonance, M. Holland et al. [12] and S. J. J. M. F. Kokkelmans et al. [22] proposed resonance mean field theory in which the molecules formed by Feshbach resonance are considered in the many-body Hamiltonian. Motivated by microscopic scattering theory and resonance mean field theory, we develop a thermodynamic method to study this system. In this method we treat atomic Fermi gases near resoance as a atom-molecule mixture. We can use BCS Hamiltonian and Bose- Einstein statistics to describe the behavior of atoms and molecules respectively. Chemical equilibrium can be achieved between atoms and molecules due to hypefine interaction. We use this method to study the system behavior under different temperature and detuning energy and find that at low temperature a smooth BCS-BEC crossever can occure with decreasing detuning energy. We further calculate a measurable quantity, molecular condensation fraction, and find its behavior matches qualitatively with the experimental result [16].
The main topic of these lectures is the physics of quantum degenerate atomic Fermi gases both under uniform confinement and in harmonic traps. To begin with, a general introduction on ideal Fermi gases is proposed. This "academic" limit is relevant in experiments where ultracold fermionic atoms are all polarized in a single spin state: the low atom momenta together with the fermionic nature of the atoms forbid atomic s-wave scattering and the atoms can be considered as free. Interactions are then introduced for the case of a gas with two spin components. Interactions can be tuned via Feshbach resonances and control the microscopic features of the superfluid phase, ranging from the BCS limit (formation of Cooper pairs) to the BEC limit (Bose-Einstein condensation of dimers). Various theoretical approaches for the description of the BCS-BEC crossover and their predictions in comparison with the experimental results are discussed.
A generic scenario of a crossover between weak-coupling and strong-coupling limits of a many-body quantum system is studied. Powerful numerical methods of investigating the strongly correlated regime are developed and applied to answering a number of important questions of the strongly correlated fermions physics. The internal structure of an exciton in an insulating medium is studied throughout the crossover between the (analytically solvable) strong- and weak-coupling limits. In the intermediate regime, accurate results for the exciton ground state are obtained and used to establish the limits of applicability of the corresponding limiting cases for the first time. A novel combination of the diagrammatic determinant Monte Carlo and the worm algorithm is developed and used for investigating the unitarity regime of the BEC-BCS crossover via simulating the dilute Fermi-Hubbard model. Superfluid phase transition and thermodynamic properties of the normal state are characterized for both lattice fermions and continuum unitary Fermi gas. The relation to current experiments with trapped ultracold quantum gases is discussed.
In order to develop our theoretical understanding of the superconducting state of strongly correlated electron systems, we investigate the many-body ground state of the attractive Hubbard model in infinite dimensions using the Gutzwiller-type projected BCS variational (GBCS) wave function. We first calculate various physical quantities by numerically evaluating analytical equations for systems in the thermodynamic limit. We then show that the GBCS wave function has the lowest energy when the gap parameter has a mixture of s wave and extended s wave pairing symmetry and that the ground state energy of the GBCS is lower than that of either the BCS or Fermi liquid at any electron density and any strength of the attractive interactions in our model. We also show that with infinite strength interactions, each pair of electrons with opposite spins forms a tightly bound pair on a lattice site (BEC-like state). We find a smooth crossover from a BCS-like state with large, overlapping Cooper pairs (for weakly attractive interactions) to a BEC-like state of composite bosons formed out of the tightly bound pairs of fermions (for strongly attractive interactions).
This chapter reviews various theoretical methods that can be applied to investigate Bose–Hubbard models. In particular, it discusses the Bogolyubov method, strong coupling expansion, the perturbative mean field approach and the Gutzwiller method, exact diagonalization, quantum Monte Carlo methods, semi-classical phase space methods, and methods specifics for 1D (Wigner-Jordan transformation, Bethe ansatz, bosonization). The chapter end with a discussion about numerical renormalization approaches in 1D (DMRG, MPS) and 2D (PEPS; MERA).