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Thermodynamic and hydrodynamic behaviour of interacting Fermi gases

Olga Goulko

Published Jan 10, 2012• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Fermionic matter is ubiquitous in nature, from the electrons in metals and semiconductors or the neutrons in the inner crust of neutron stars, to gases of fermionic atoms, like 40K or 6Li that can be created and studied under laboratory conditions. It is especially interesting to study these systems at very low temperatures, where we enter the world of quantum mechanical phenomena. Due to the Fermi-Dirac statistics, a dilute system of spin-polarised fermions exhibits no interactions and can be viewed as an ideal Fermi gas. However, interactions play a crucial role for fermions of several spin species. This thesis addresses several questions concerning interacting Fermi gases, in particular the transition between the normal and the superfluid phase and dynamical properties at higher temperatures. First we will look at the unitary Fermi gas: a two-component system of fermions interacting with divergent scattering length. This system is particularly interesting as it exhibits universal behaviour. Due to the strong interactions perturbation theory is inapplicable and no exact theoretical description is available. I will describe the Determinant Diagrammatic Monte Carlo algorithm with which the unitary Fermi gas can be studied from first principles. This algorithm fails in the presence of a spin imbalance (unequal number of particles in the two components) due to a sign problem. I will show how to apply reweighting techniques to generalise the algorithm to the imbalanced case, and present results for the critical temperature and other thermodynamic observables at the critical point, namely the chemical potential, the energy per particle and the contact density. These are the first numerical results for the imbalanced unitary Fermi gas at finite temperature. I will also show how temperatures beyond the critical point can be accessed and present results for the equation of state and the temperature dependence of the contact density. At sufficiently high temperatures a semiclassical description captures all relevant physical features of the system. The dynamics of an interacting Fermi gas can then be studied via a numerical simulation of the Boltzmann equation. I will describe such a numerical setup and apply it to study the collision of two spin-polarised fermionic clouds. When the two components are separated in an elongated harmonic trap and then released, they collide and for sufficiently strong interactions can bounce off each other several times. I will discuss the different types of the qualitative behaviour, show how they can be interpreted in terms of the equilibrium properties of the system, and explain how they relate to the coupling between different excitation modes. I will also demonstrate how transport coefficients, for instance the spin drag, can be extracted from the numerical data.

DOI
10.17863/cam.16110

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Fermionic matter is ubiquitous in nature, from the electrons in metals and semiconductors or the neutrons in the inner crust of neutron stars, to gases of fermionic atoms, like 40K or 6Li that can be created and studied under laboratory conditions. It is especially interesting to study these systems at very low temperatures, where we enter the world of quantum mechanical phenomena. Due to the Fermi-Dirac statistics, a dilute system of spin-polarised fermions exhibits no interactions and can be viewed as an ideal Fermi gas. However, interactions play a crucial role for fermions of several spin species. This thesis addresses several questions concerning interacting Fermi gases, in particular the transition between the normal and the superfluid phase and dynamical properties at higher temperatures. First we will look at the unitary Fermi gas: a two-component system of fermions interacting with divergent scattering length. This system is particularly interesting as it exhibits universal behaviour. Due to the strong interactions perturbation theory is inapplicable and no exact theoretical description is available. I will describe the Determinant Diagrammatic Monte Carlo algorithm with which the unitary Fermi gas can be studied from first principles. This algorithm fails in the presence of a spin imbalance (unequal number of particles in the two components) due to a sign problem. I will show how to apply reweighting techniques to generalise the algorithm to the imbalanced case, and present results for the critical temperature and other thermodynamic observables at the critical point, namely the chemical potential, the energy per particle and the contact density. These are the first numerical results for the imbalanced unitary Fermi gas at finite temperature. I will also show how temperatures beyond the critical point can be accessed and present results for the equation of state and the temperature dependence of the contact density. At sufficiently high temperatures a semiclassical description captures all relevant physical features of the system. The dynamics of an interacting Fermi gas can then be studied via a numerical simulation of the Boltzmann equation. I will describe such a numerical setup and apply it to study the collision of two spin-polarised fermionic clouds. When the two components are separated in an elongated harmonic trap and then released, they collide and for sufficiently strong interactions can bounce off each other several times. I will discuss the different types of the qualitative behaviour, show how they can be interpreted in terms of the equilibrium properties of the system, and explain how they relate to the coupling between different excitation modes. I will also demonstrate how transport coefficients, for instance the spin drag, can be extracted from the numerical data.
The quantum many-body problem is at the heart of some of the most formidable open problems in modern physics, such as high-Tc_cc​ superconductivity or the behaviour of neutron stars. Ultracold atomic systems can now be used to simulate model Hamiltonians of condensed matter or nuclear physics, in very well-controlled environnement. In this thesis, we have developed a general method to probe the thermodynamics of homogeneous quantum systems using trapped atomic gases. These measurements are directly compared to the predictions of theories of the quantum many-body problem. We have applied this technique to the spin-1/21/21/2 Fermi gas and the Bose with short-range interactions. Using fermionic 6^66Li, we explored a part of the wide parameter space by changing the interaction strength, the spin-population imbalance or the temperature of the gas. This system exhibits remarkably rich physics, such as normal/superfluid phase transitions (that can be of thermal or quantum character) or a Fermi liquid-type behaviour of the normal phase. We have also used this method to probe a Bose gas of 7^77Li atoms close to a Feshbach resonance. We have measured the Equation of State of the Bose gas as a function of interactions at very low temperature. For the first time, we measured quantitatively the Lee-Huang-Yang beyond mean-field correction to the ground-state energy of the system, first predicted in 1957. We compared the experimental results to Quantum Monte-Carlo calculations. We have extended this study using out-of-equilibrium measurements of the Bose gas in the strongly interacting regime, which gives a first hint on the properties of the hypothetical unitary Bose gas.
Ultracold dilute atomic gases can be considered as model systems to address some pending problem in Many-Body physics that occur in condensed matter systems, nuclear physics, and astrophysics. We have developed a general method to probe with high precision the thermodynamics of locally homogeneous ultracold Bose and Fermi gases. This method allows stringent tests of recent many-body theories. For attractive spin 1/2 fermions with tunable interaction (6Li), we will show that the gas thermodynamic properties can continuously change from those of weakly interacting Cooper pairs described by BardeenCooper-Schrieffer theory to those of strongly bound molecules undergoing Bose-Einstein condensation. First, we focus on the finite-temperature Equation of State (EoS) of the unpolarized unitary gas. Surprisingly, the low-temperature properties of the strongly interacting normal phase are well described by Fermi liquid theory and we localize the superfluid phase transition. A detailed comparison with theories including Monte-Carlo calculations has revealed some surprises and the Lee-Huang-Yang corrections for low-density bosonic and fermionic superfluids are quantitatively measured for the first time. Despite orders of magnitude difference in density and temperature, our equation of state can be used to describe low density neutron matter such as the outer shell of neutron stars.
Strongly correlated fermionic many-body systems are ubiquitous in nature. Their theoretical description poses challenging problems which are further complicated when imbalances in, e.g., the particle numbers of the involved species or their masses are introduced. In this thesis, a number of different approaches is developed and applied in order to obtain predictions for physical observables of such systems that mutually support and confirm each other. In a first step, analytically well-founded mean-field analyses are carried through. One- and three-dimensional ultracold Fermi gases with spin and mass imbalance as well as Gross-Neveu and NJL-type relativistic models at finite baryon chemical potential are investigated with respect to their analytic properties in general and the occurrence of spontaneous breaking of translational invariance in particular. Based on these studies, further methods are devised or adapted allowing for investigations also beyond the mean-field approximation. Lattice Monte Carlo simulations with imaginary imbalance parameters are employed to surmount the infamous sign problem and compute the equation of state of the respective unitary Fermi gases. Moreover, in-medium two-body analyses are used to confirm and explain the characteristics of inhomogeneously ordered phases. Finally, functional RG methods are applied to the unitary Fermi gas with spin and mass imbalance. Besides quantitatively competitive predictions for critical temperatures for the superfluid state, strong hints on the stability of inhomogeneous phases with respect to order parameter fluctuations in the regime of large mass imbalance are obtained. Combining the findings from these different theoretical studies suggests the possibility to find such phases in experiments presently in preparation.
In this thesis we first review the theory of the normal state of the unitary Fermi gas at T = 0 and the main properties of the normal-to-superfluid transition. Then we study the trapped gas under adiabatic rotation, i.e., avoiding the formation of vortices. We show that for polarized systems the rotation enhances the Chandrasekhar-Clogston limit due to pair breaking at the border between the superfluid and the normal phase, while it leaves the global critical polarization Pc of the trapped system unaffected. In the case of an unpolarized unitary superfluid the rotation causes a phase separation between a superfluid core and an unpolarized normal shell, in which the densities of the spin-up and spin-down atom numbers is equal. For both the polarized and the unpolarized systems we calculate experimental observables such as the density profiles and the angular momenta. From the study of Bose-Einstein condensates it is well known that an adiabatic rotation induces a quadrupole deformation of the trapped atomic cloud when the rotation exceeds a certain angular velocity. In Fermi gases the situation is different due to the phase separation discussed above, and the quadrupole instabilities are found to set on at smaller angular velocity than in the BEC case. This phenomenon together with a more general discussion concerning not only the energetic but also the dynamic instabilities of the phase separated system is presented. We use the present knowledge of the equation of state of Fermi mixtures with unequal masses to give quantitative predictions for the phase separation between the normal and superfluid components. The analysis is based on the study of the zero temperature μ-h phase diagram of the uniform two component gas. The phase diagram at unitarity is determined thanks to the knowledge of the equation of state available from diagrammatic techniques applied to highly polarized configurations and from Monte Carlo simulations. The phase diagram is then used, in the local density approximation, to calculate the density profiles of the two Fermi components in the presence of harmonic trapping. Eventually we investigate the polarization produced by the relative displacement of the potentials trapping two spin species of a unitary Fermi gas with population imbalance. We investigate the dipole polarizability of a polarized system both in the two-fluid and the three-fluid model at zero temperature and point out the major differences between the two treatments.
Strongly coupled quantum matter displays a rich phenomenology including phase transitions and often unexpected collective behavior. Remarkable advances in experiments with ultracold Fermi gases allow us to gain deep insight into these intriguing systems. Their theoretical description, however, is often challenging as exact analytic solutions are available only in a few special cases, and approximate techniques such as mean-field or perturbation theory are of limited use. Numerical treatment with Monte Carlo (MC) methods has led to profound success in this regard. Unfortunately, for many systems - and especially for asymmetric quantum gases - the infamous sign problem slows progress due to an exponentially scaling of the computational effort with inceasing system size. In this thesis, we set out to explore the rich physics of two-component Fermi gases in the presence of finite spin polarization and/or mass imbalance. To surmount an arising sign problem, we learn from methodological advances made in the field of quantum chromodynamics and further develop these lattice approaches in the context of nonrelativistic Fermi gases. An extensive overview of the numerical methods is presented, including several toy problems to detail the capabilities and shortcomings of the developed approaches. With these tools in hand, we perform extensive benchmarks of the hybrid Monte Carlo method with imaginary asymmetries (iHMC) and the complex Langevin (CL) method, which is based on a complex version of stochastic quantization. Both approaches are shown to yield excellent results for the ground-state energy equation of state of mass-imbalanced Fermi gases in one spatial dimension. Due to its great versatility, the CL method is subsequently employed to study pairing in one-dimensional Fermi gases, for which suitable two-body correlations are computed, revealing unexpected pairing patterns for spin- and mass-imbalanced systems. Another major system of interest in this thesis is the paradigmatic unitary Fermi gas which is investigated at finite temperature and spin polarization. A precise determination of the density equation of state in the normal phase enables us to explore a broad range of thermodynamic properties. We infer valuable information on the finite-temperature phase diagram, such as a flat phase boundary of the normal-to-superfluid transition near the balanced limit and indications for the absence of an extensive pseudogap phase above this transition. The presented results provide experimentally testable ab initio predictions for a range of previously inaccessible thermodynamic quantities.
We will present recent experimental work on the thermodynamics of strongly interacting Fermi gases. We have developed a general method to probe with high precision the Equation of State (EoS) of locally homogeneous ultracold gases. This allows stringent tests of recent many-body theories. First, we focus on the finite-temperature EoS of the unpolarized unitary gas. Precise thermometry is provided by adding to the Fermi gas of 6Li a trace of bosonic 7Li. We show that the low-temperature properties of the strongly interacting normal phase are well described by Fermi liquid theory and we localize the superfluid transition. Second, we address the zero-temperature EoS of the spin-polarized system in the BEC-BCS crossover. Surprisingly, despite strong interactions, the polarized phase behaves as a mixture of two ideal gases: a Fermi gas of majority atoms and a non-interacting gas of dressed quasi-particles, the Fermi polarons. We also obtain the equation of state of the superfluid state as a function of interaction strength, that we compare to Monte Carlo simulations and to the Lee-Huang-Yang corrections for low-density bosonic and fermionic superfluids.