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Scientific Reports

Spontaneous separation of large-spin Fermi gas in the harmonic trap: a density functional study

Zongli Sun, Qiang Gu

Published Aug 23, 2016• 4 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The component separation of the trapped large-spin Fermi gas is studied within density functional theory. The ground state and ferromagnetic transition in the gas, with and without the spin mixing collision, are calculated. In the absence of spin mixing, two patterns of separation are observed as the interaction between atoms increases, whereas only one of them corresponds to a ferromagnetic transition. The phase diagram suggests that the pattern which the system chooses depends on the interaction strength in the collision channels. With the presence of spin mixing, the distribution of phase region changes because of the interplay between different collision channels. Specifically, the spin exchange benefits the FM transition, while it suppresses the component separation of CS-II pattern.

DOI
10.1038/srep31776

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The component separation of the trapped large-spin Fermi gas is studied within density functional theory. The ground state and ferromagnetic transition in the gas, with and without the spin mixing collision, are calculated. In the absence of spin mixing, two patterns of separation are observed as the interaction between atoms increases, whereas only one of them corresponds to a ferromagnetic transition. The phase diagram suggests that the pattern which the system chooses depends on the interaction strength in the collision channels. With the presence of spin mixing, the distribution of phase region changes because of the interplay between different collision channels. Specifically, the spin exchange benefits the FM transition, while it suppresses the component separation of CS-II pattern.
We investigate the component separation in one-dimensional two-component fermion clouds in a spin-dependent external potential. The density distributions and the state diagram are studied by means of spin-dependent density-functional theory. The component separation between spin-up and spin-down atoms is induced by the interplay of the spin-dependent harmonic confinement and the strong repulsive interaction between the intercomponents. We find the existence of a threshold repulsive interaction strength above which the component separation evolves. Different state diagrams are mapped out numerically, from which two regions are distinguished, i.e., the phase-mixed region with both spin-up and spin-down mixtures in the center of the trap and the phase-separated region with only spin-up atoms remaining in the center.
We study ferromagnetism in a repulsively interacting two-component Fermi gas in a harmonic trap. Within a local density approximation, the two components phase separate beyond a critical interaction strength, with one species having a higher density at the trap center. We discuss several easily observable experimental signatures of this transition. The mean-field release energy, its separate kinetic and interaction contributions, as well as the potential energy all depend on the interaction strength and contain a sharp signature of this transition. In addition, the conversion rate of atoms to molecules, arising from three-body collisions, peaks at an interaction strength just beyond the ferromagnetic transition point. We then go beyond the local density approximation and derive an energy functional that includes a term that depends on the local magnetization gradient and acts as a ``surface tension.'' Using this energy functional, we numerically study the energetics of some candidate spin textures that may be stabilized in a harmonic trapping potential at zero net magnetization. We find that a hedgehog state has a lower energy than an ``in-out'' domain-wall state in an isotropic trap. Upon inclusion of trap anisotropy we find that the hedgehog magnetization profile gets distorted due to the surface tension term, this distortion being more apparent for small atom numbers. We estimate that the magnetic dipole interaction does not play a significant role in this system. We consider possible implications for experiments on trapped 6Li^{6}\text{L}\text{i}6Li and 40K^{40}\text{K}40K gases.
The two-component Fermi gas in a double-well trap is studied using the density functional theory and the density profile of each component is calculated within the Thomas-Fermi approximation. We show that the two components are spatially separate in the two wells once the repulsive interaction exceeds the Stoner point, signaling the occurrence of the ferromagnetic transition. Therefore, the double-well trap helps to explore itinerant ferromagnetism in atomic Fermi gases, since the spontaneous separation can be examined by measuring component populations in one well.
We have observed phase separation between the superfluid and the normal component in a strongly interacting Fermi gas with imbalanced spin populations. The in situ distribution of the density difference between two trapped spin components is obtained using phase-contrast imaging and 3D image reconstruction. A shell structure is clearly identified where the superfluid region of equal densities is surrounded by a normal gas of unequal densities. The phase transition induces a dramatic change in the density profiles as excess fermions are expelled from the superfluid.
We predict the phase separations of two-dimensional Fermi gases with repulsive contact-type interactions between two spin components. Using density-potential functional theory with systematic semiclassical approximations, we address the long-standing problem of itinerant ferromagnetism in realistic settings. We reveal a universal transition from the paramagnetic state at small repulsive interactions toward ferromagnetic density profiles at large interaction strengths, with intricate particle-number dependent phases in between. Building on quantum Monte Carlo results for uniform systems, we benchmark our simulations against Hartree–Fock calculations for a small number of trapped fermions. We thereby demonstrate that our employed corrections to the bare contact interaction energy and especially to the Thomas–Fermi kinetic energy functional are necessary for reliably predicting properties of trapped mesoscopic Fermi gases. The density patterns of the ground state survive at low finite temperatures and confirm the Stoner-type polarization behavior across a universal interaction parameter, albeit with substantial quantitative differences that originate in the trapping potential and the quantum-corrected kinetic energy. We also uncover a plethora of metastable configurations that are energetically comparable to the ground-state density profiles and are thus likely to be observed in experiments. We argue that our density-functional approach can be easily applied to interacting multi-component Fermi gases in general.
We investigate the ground-state properties of two-component Bose gases confined in one-dimensional harmonic traps in the scheme of density-functional theory. The density-functional calculations employ a Bethe-ansatz-based local-density approximation for the correlation energy, which accounts for the correlation effect properly from the weakly interacting regime to the strongly interacting regime. For the binary Bose mixture with spin-independent interaction, the homogeneous reference system is exactly solvable by the Bethe-ansatz method. Within the local-density approximation, we determine the density distribution of each component and study its evolution from Bose distributions to Fermi-like distribution with the increase in interaction. For the binary mixture of Tonks-Girardeau gases with a tunable interspecies repulsion, with a generalized Bose-Fermi transformation we show that the Bose mixture can be mapped into a two-component Fermi gas, which corresponds to exact soluble Yang-Gaudin model for the homogeneous system. Based on the ground-state energy function of the Yang-Gaudin model, the ground-state density distributions are calculated for various interspecies interactions. It is shown that with the increase in interspecies interaction, the system exhibits composite-fermionization crossover.