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Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics

Crossover from Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer to Bose-Einstein Condensation and the Unitary Fermi Gas

Mohit Randeria, Edward Taylor

Published Jan 14, 2014• 273 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The crossover from weak-coupling Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) pairing to a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of tightly bound pairs, as a function of the attractive interaction in Fermi systems, has long been of interest to theoretical physicists. The past decade has seen a series of remarkable experimental developments in ultracold Fermi gases that have realized the BCS-BEC crossover in the laboratory, bringing with it fresh new insights into the very strongly interacting unitary regime in the middle of this crossover. In this review, we start with a pedagogical introduction to the crossover and then focus on recent progress in the strongly interacting regime. Although our focus is on new theoretical developments, we also describe three key experiments that probe the thermodynamics, transport, and spectroscopy of the unitary Fermi gas. We discuss connections between the unitary regime and other areas of physics—quark-gluon plasmas, gauge-gravity duality, and high-temperature superconductivity—and conclude with open questions about strongly interacting Fermi gases.

DOI
10.1146/annurev-conmatphys-031113-133829

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The crossover from weak-coupling Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) pairing to a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of tightly bound pairs, as a function of the attractive interaction in Fermi systems, has long been of interest to theoretical physicists. The past decade has seen a series of remarkable experimental developments in ultracold Fermi gases that have realized the BCS-BEC crossover in the laboratory, bringing with it fresh new insights into the very strongly interacting unitary regime in the middle of this crossover. In this review, we start with a pedagogical introduction to the crossover and then focus on recent progress in the strongly interacting regime. Although our focus is on new theoretical developments, we also describe three key experiments that probe the thermodynamics, transport, and spectroscopy of the unitary Fermi gas. We discuss connections between the unitary regime and other areas of physics—quark-gluon plasmas, gauge-gravity duality, and high-temperature superconductivity—and conclude with open questions about strongly interacting Fermi gases.
The crossover from weak coupling Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) pairing to a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of tightly bound pairs, as a function of the attractive interaction in Fermi systems, has long been of interest to theoretical physicists. The past decade has seen a series of remarkable experimental developments in ultracold Fermi gases that has realized the BCS-BEC crossover in the laboratory, bringing with it fresh new insights into the very strongly interacting unitary regime in the middle of this crossover. In this review, we start with a pedagogical introduction to the crossover and then focus on recent progress in the strongly interacting regime. While our focus is on new theoretical developments, we also describe three key experiments that probe the thermodynamics, transport and spectroscopy of the unitary Fermi gas. We discuss connections between the unitary regime and other areas of physics -- quark-gluon plasmas, gauge-gravity duality and high temperature superconductivity -- and conclude with open questions about strongly interacting Fermi gases.
In our recent experiments at MIT, superfluidity has been observed in a strongly interacting atomic Fermi gas. These systems constitute a novel form of matter with model character: One can vary the temperature, density and dimensionality, the number of “spin up” versus “spin down” fermions, and, most remarkably, the interactions can be precisely controlled over an enormous range. This allows to study the crossover of a Bose-Einstein condensate of tightly bound molecules to a Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer superfluid of long-range Cooper pairs. Superfluidity in this crossover regime is demonstrated by setting the gas under rotation and observing ordered lattices of quantized vortices [1]. Thanks to its strong interactions, the gas is a high-temperature superfluid: Scaled to the density of electrons in a metal, superfluidity would occur already far above room temperature. A new regime is entered when the number of spin up versus spin down atoms is imbalanced. In this case, not every spin up atom can find a spin down partner. The ground state of such a system has been under debate for over 40 years. We observe the breakdown of superfluidity at a critical imbalance, the Chandrasekhar-Clogston limit [2]. The superfluid gives way to an intriguing, strongly-interacting Fermi gas with unequal spin populations [3, 4].
The ability to control the interaction strength between atoms within strongly interacting Fermi gases by sweeping a magnetic field across a Feshbach resonance provides a powerful experimental system in which to study many-body physics. One example is the crossover from a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) regime, in which the atoms are strongly coupled into pairs, to the weak-coupling regime that mimics Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) coupling of electrons in superconducting metals. Although behavior on either side of the resonance is fairly well understood, of immediate interest is to find out what happens in the BEC-BCS crossover regime. However, determining the relative contributions of atom pairing mechanisms is an experimental and theoretical challenge.
This chapter explains an accurate theory of interacting Fermi mixtures with spin imbalance that shows novel features and a far richer phase diagram compared to the balanced counterpart. Ultracold quantum gases of fermionic atoms are at the crossroads of both experimental and theoretical physicists and present the possibility of experimentally studying various pairing phenomena due to the remarkable experimental control in these gases. This has related to many fundamental discoveries and, in particular, to the realization of the crossover from a Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer (BCS) superfluid of loosely bound Cooper pairs to a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of tightly bound molecules, the so-called the BEC-BCS crossover. The BCS theory is one of the greatest theoretical advances in physics in the second half of the twentieth century and was first fully formulated in 1957 by Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer.
Ultracold atomic gases are a powerful tool to experimentally study strongly correlated quantum many-body systems. In particular, ultracold Fermi gases with tunable interactions have allowed to realize the famous BEC-BCS crossover from a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of molecules to a Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superfluid of weakly bound Cooper pairs. However, large parts of the excitation spectrum of fermionic superfluids in the BEC-BCS crossover are still unexplored. In this work, we use Bragg spectroscopy to measure the full momentum-resolved low-energy excitation spectrum of strongly interacting ultracold Fermi gases. This enables us to directly observe the smooth transformation from a bosonic to a fermionic superfluid that takes place in the BEC-BCS crossover. We also use our spectra to determine the evolution of the superfluid gap and find excellent agreement with previous experiments and self-consistent T-matrix calculations both in the BEC and crossover regime. However, toward the BCS regime a calculation that includes the effects of particle-hole correlations shows better agreement with our data.
We theoretically investigate the specific heat at constant volume C V in the BCS(Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer)-BEC(Bose-Einstein-condensation)-crossover regime of an ultracold Fermi gas, below the superfluid phase transition temperature T c . Within the strong-coupling framework developed by Nozières and Schmitt-Rink, we show that the temperature dependence of C V drastically changes as one passes through the crossover region, and is sensitive to strong fluctuations in the Cooper channel near the unitarity limit. We also compare our results to a recent experiment on a 6 Li unitary Fermi gas. Since fluctuation effects are a crucial key in the BCS-BEC-crossover phenomenon, our results would be helpful in considering how the fermionic BCS superfluid changes into BEC with increasing the interaction strength, from the viewpoint of specific heat.