Recent experiments have observed condensation behavior in a strongly interacting system of fermionic atoms. We interpret these observations in terms of a mean-field version of resonance superfluidity theory. We find that the objects condensed are not bosonic molecules composed of bound fermion pairs, but are rather spatially correlated Cooper pairs whose coherence length is comparable to the mean spacing between atoms. We propose experiments that will help to further probe these novel pairs.
Recent experiments have observed condensation behavior in a strongly interacting system of fermionic atoms. We interpret these observations in terms of a mean-field version of resonance superfluidity theory. We find that the objects condensed are not bosonic molecules composed of bound fermion pairs, but are rather spatially correlated Cooper pairs whose coherence length is comparable to the mean spacing between atoms. We propose experiments that will help to further probe these novel pairs.
The use of Feshbach resonances in the field of ultracold gases has received a lot of attention recently. In first instance it was realized that these resonances can be used to alter the interaction strength in an atomic gas, by means of tuning an external magnetic field. Furthermore, by sweeping the magnetic field from one side of the resonance to the other, a degenerate gas of bosonic molecules can be created, a significant accomplishment. By making the interactions between fermionic atoms strongly attractive, a fermionic superfluid was recently made, a feat that has drawn a lot of attention in the physics community and from the media. We present work that describes these many-particle systems near a Feshbach resonance in a comprehensive way by using the concept of dressed molecules. These dressed molecules are essentially two-particle states that are a superposition of a tightly bound bare molecule, and two unbound bare atoms. This description reduces to the correct paired wave-function in the two-body limit. Moreover it gives a physically correct description of all the phenomena mentioned above: the Bose-condensation of a gas near a Feshbach resonance, that contains molecules, is more correctly interpreted as a Bose-condensation of dressed molecules. The fermionic superfluid contains a condensate of bosonic pairs, normally called Cooper pairs, that can be understood as the dressed molecules. For the latter case, the dressed-molecule picture also gives an elegant characterization of the crossover between a Bose condensate of pure molecules on one side of the resonance, to a fermionic Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer superfluid on the other side. Then, the dressed molecules change continuously from being mostly a bare molecule, to being mostly a loose pair of two atoms. It is clear that the nature of the dressed molecules is much determined by the probability for it to be in the bare-molecular state. This probability we denote with a single parameter Z. We present various ways of calculating it, and study how it affects the macroscopic physics.
We consider a system of repulsively interacting Bose-Fermi mixtures of spin-polarized uniform atomic gases at zero temperature. We examine possible realization of p-wave superfluidity of fermions due to an effective attractive interaction via density fluctuations of Bose-Einstein condensate within mean-field approximation. We find the ground state of the system by direct energy comparison of the p-wave superfluid state in a single uniform mixed phase and normal Fermi gas state in a phase-separated phase, and suggest an occurrence of the p-wave superfluidity for a strong boson-fermion interaction regime. We study some signatures of the p-wave superfluid, such as anisotropic energy gap and quasiparticle energy in the axial state, that have not been observed in spin-unpolarized superfluid of atomic fermions. We also show that a Cooper pair is a tightly bound state, such as a diatomic molecule in the strong boson-fermion coupling regime, and suggest an observable indication of the p-wave superfluid in the real experiment.
The Hubbard model of attractively interacting fermions provides a paradigmatic setting for fermion pairing. It features a crossover between Bose-Einstein condensation of tightly bound pairs and Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer superfluidity of long-range Cooper pairs, and a "pseudo-gap" region where pairs form above the superfluid critical temperature. We directly observe the nonlocal nature of fermion pairing in a Hubbard lattice gas, using spin- and density-resolved imaging of [Formula: see text]1000 fermionic potassium-40 atoms under a bilayer microscope. Complete fermion pairing is revealed by the vanishing of global spin fluctuations with increasing attraction. In the strongly correlated regime, the fermion pair size is found to be on the order of the average interparticle spacing. Our study informs theories of pseudo-gap behavior in strongly correlated fermion systems.
We determine the adiabatic phase diagram of a resonantly-coupled system of Fermi atoms and Bose molecules confined in the harmonic trap by using the local density approximation. The adiabatic phase diagram shows the fermionic condensate fraction composed of condensed molecules and Cooper pair atoms. The key idea of our work is conservation of entropy through the adiabatic process, extending the study of Williams et al. [Williams et al., New J. Phys. 6, 123 (2004)] for an ideal gas mixture to include the resonant interaction in a mean-field theory. We also calculate the molecular conversion efficiency as a function of initial temperature. Our work helps to understand recent experiments on the BCS-BEC crossover, in terms of the initial temperature measured before a sweep of the magnetic field.
With help of a Feshbach scattering resonance it is possible to change the effective two-body interaction of ultra-cold atoms from repulsive to attractive, from weak to strong. Regular field theory for the description of Bose-Einstein condensates is based on a single interaction parameter only, the scattering length. Such a description, however, is not valid anymore for the resonance regime. We formulated a field-theory that incorporated the microscopic energy-dependent two-body interactions, that also takes pair correlations into account. This theory allowed us to explain an experiment at JILA where Ramsey fringes were observed in a ^85Rb Bose-Einstein condensate by making use of a Feshbach resonance. The theory and experiment show that coherent molecules are created, a first step in the direction of molecular BEC. For non-resonant interactions, the self-energy corresponding to the atom-atom interactions is proportional to the scattering length. Close to resonance, however, this relationship no longer applies, and the energy will level off to a finite value on resonance. We investigate this resonance self-energy, and compare it with experimental results from strongly interacting Fermi systems.
We theoretically investigate strong-coupling properties of an odd-frequency Fermi superfluid. This pairing state has the unique property that Cooper pairs are formed between fermions, not at the same time, but at different times. To see whether or not such unequal-time pairs still exhibit bosonic behavior, we examine the space-time structure of the odd-frequency Cooper-pair wave function at T=0, by employing the combined path-integral formalism with the BCS-Eagles-Leggett-type superfluid theory. In the strong-coupling regime, the odd-frequency pair wave function still has different space-time structure from that in the ordinary even-frequency s-wave superfluid state; their magnitudes are found to become close to each other, except for the equal-time pairing component. In this regime, we also evaluate the superfluid phase transition temperature Tc within the framework of the strong-coupling theory developed by Nozi\`eres and Schmitt-Rink. The calculated Tc in the strong-coupling regime of the odd-frequency system is found to be well described by the Bose-Einstein condensation of tightly bound Bose molecules. Our results indicate that, in spite of vanishing equal-time pairing, odd-frequency Cooper pairs still behave like bosons in the strong-coupling regime, as in the even-frequency s-wave superfluid case.