We study the ground state of a bilayer system of dipolar bosons with dipoles oriented by an external field perpendicularly to the two parallel planes. By decreasing the interlayer distance, for a fixed value of the strength of the dipolar interaction, the system undergoes a quantum phase transition from an atomic to a pair superfluid. We investigate the excitation spectrum on both sides of this transition by using two microscopic approaches. Quantum Monte Carlo methods are employed to obtain the static structure factors and intermediate scattering functions in imaginary time. The dynamic response is calculated using both the correlated basis functions (CBF) method and the approximate inversion of the Laplace transform of the quantum Monte Carlo imaginary time data. In the atomic phase, both the density and spin excitations are gapless. However, in the pair-superfluid phase a gap opens in the excitation energy of the spin mode. For small separation between layers, the minimal spin excitation energy equals the binding energy of a dimer and is twice the gap value.
It is shown by microscopic calculations for trapped imbalanced Fermi superfluids that the gap function always has sign changes, i.e., the Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO)-like state, up to a critical imbalance P(c), beyond which normal state becomes stable, at temperature T=0. A temperature-versus-pressure phase diagram is constructed, where the BCS state without sign change is stable only at T not equal to 0. We reproduce the observed bimodality in the density profile to identify its origin and evaluate P(c) as functions of T and the coupling strength. These dependencies match with the recent experiments.
The frequencies of the analytic normal modes for
N identical particles are studied as a function of system parameters from the weakly interacting BCS regime to the strongly interacting unitary regime. The normal modes were obtained previously from a first-order
L=0 group theoretic solution of a three-dimensional Hamiltonian with a general two-body interaction for confined identical particles. In a precursor to this study, the collective behavior of these normal modes was investigated as a function of
N from few-body systems to many-body systems analyzing the contribution of individual particles to the collective macroscopic motions. A specific case, the Hamiltonian for Fermi gases in the unitary regime, was studied in more detail. This regime is known to support collective behavior in the form of superfluidity and has previously been successfully described using normal modes. Two phenomena that could sustain the emergence and stability of superfluid behavior were revealed, including the behavior of the normal mode frequencies as
N increases. In this paper, I focus on a more detailed analysis of these analytic frequencies, extending my investigation to include Hamiltonians with a range of interparticle interaction strengths from the BCS regime to the unitary regime and analyzing the microscopic dynamics that lead to large gaps at unitarity. The results of the present study suggest that in regimes where higher-order effects are small, normal modes can be used to describe the physics of superfluidity from the weakly interacting BCS regime with the emergence of small excitation gaps to unitarity with its large gaps and can offer insight into a possible microscopic understanding of the behavior at unitarity. This approach could thus offer an alternative to the two-body pairing models commonly used to describe superfluidity along this transition.