The BCS-BEC crossover is studied in a systematic way in the broken-symmetry phase between zero temperature and the critical temperature. This study bridges two regimes where quantum and thermal fluctuations are, respectively, important. The theory is implemented on physical grounds, by adopting a fermionic self-energy in the broken-symmetry phase that represents fermions coupled to superconducting fluctuations in weak coupling and to bosons described by the Bogoliubov theory in strong coupling. This extension of the theory beyond mean field proves important at finite temperature, to connect with the results in the normal phase. The order parameter, the chemical potential, and the single-particle spectral function are calculated numerically for a wide range of coupling and temperature. This enables us to assess the quantitative importance of superconducting fluctuations in the broken-symmetry phase over the whole BCS-BEC crossover. Our results are relevant to the possible realizations of this crossover with high-temperature cuprate superconductors and with ultracold fermionic atoms in a trap.
The BCS-BEC crossover is studied in a systematic way in the broken-symmetry phase between zero temperature\nand the critical temperature. This study bridges two regimes where quantum and thermal fluctuations\nare, respectively, important. The theory is implemented on physical grounds, by adopting a fermionic selfenergy\nin the broken-symmetry phase that represents fermions coupled to superconducting fluctuations in weak\ncoupling and to bosons described by the Bogoliubov theory in strong coupling. This extension of the theory\nbeyond mean field proves important at finite temperature, to connect with the results in the normal phase. The\norder parameter, the chemical potential, and the single-particle spectral function are calculated numerically for\na wide range of coupling and temperature. This enables us to assess the quantitative importance of superconducting\nfluctuations in the broken-symmetry phase over the whole BCS-BEC crossover. Our results are relevant\nto the possible realizations of this crossover with high-temperature cuprate superconductors and with\nultracold fermionic atoms in a trap.
The continuous crossover between a Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS)-type superfluid of fermion pairs and a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of tightly bound bosonic molecules can be attributed to the spontaneous breaking of global
U(1) gauge symmetry which underlies both quantum condensation phenomena. Recently much attention has been paid to this problem, since Feshbach resonances allow for an experimental implementation of crossover physics in cold fermion gases. The strong interactions close to resonance call for an analysis beyond Mean Field Theory. We develop a systematic functional integral approach for the description of this phenomenon. Starting from a Yukawa-type atom-molecule model, a symmetry analysis allows to both construct the equation of state and to classify the thermodynamic phases in a unified way. The onset of superfluidity is signalled by the emergence of a massless Goldstone mode associated with the broken continuous U(1) symmetry. Beyond Mean Field, we include fluctuations of the molecule field self-consistently via the solution of suitable Schwinger-Dyson equations. The phase diagram is computed, and a variety of universal features are established. A new form of crossover from an exactly solvable narrow resonance limit to broad resonances or pointlike interactions is found. At low temperature our results agree well with quantum Monte Carlo simulations and recent experiments. Our approach is further developed in the frame of functional renormalization group equations. While the effective bosonic theory in the BEC regime shows the characteristics of a Bogoliubov theory for small temperatures, the phase transition is of second order.
We consider the BCS-BEC (Bose-Einstein-condensate) crossover for a system of trapped Fermi atoms at finite temperature, both below and above the superfluid critical temperature, by including fluctuations beyond mean field. We determine the superfluid critical temperature and the pair-breaking temperature as functions of the attractive interaction between Fermi atoms, from the weak- to the strong-coupling limit (where bosonic molecules form as bound-fermion pairs). Density profiles in the trap are also obtained for all temperatures and couplings.
We study the
T=0 crossover from the BCS superconductivity to Bose-Einstein condensation in the attractive Hubbard Model within dynamical mean field theory (DMFT) in order to examine the validity of Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov (HFB) mean field theory, usually used to describe this crossover, and to explore the physics beyond it. Quantum fluctuations are incorporated using iterated perturbation theory as the DMFT impurity solver. We find that these fluctuations lead to large quantitative effects in the intermediate coupling regime, leading to a reduction of both the superconducting order parameter and the energy gap relative to the HFB results. A qualitative change is found in the single-electron spectral function, which now shows an incoherent spectral weight for energies larger than three times the gap, in addition to the usual Bogoliubov quasiparticle peaks.
This Thesis analyzes the role of a mean-field theory and of the fluctuations in two different fermionic systems: the BCS-BEC crossover and high-Tc superconducting cuprates. In the first part of the Thesis we introduce the mean-field theory and the Gaussian-level fluctuations for the BCS-BEC crossover, i.e. the continuous evolution observed in ultracold neutral fermionic systems, from a weakly-coupled regime where fermions form Cooper pairs, to a strongly-coupled regime where the fermions at first form bosonic molecular dimers, subsequently undergoing Bose-Einstein condensation for low enough temperatures. We then analyze some problems related to the crossover: the condensate fraction for a spin-unbalanced Fermi gas, the Beliaev decay for collective excitations and the case of a two-dimensional Fermi gas, for which we calculate the first sound velocity and the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless critical temperature, in very good agreement with recent experimental data. Finally we analyze a regularization procedure for the equation of state in the deep-BEC limit, allowing one to analytically derive the correct ratio between the fermionic and bosonic scattering lengths. In the second part of the Thesis we introduce a gauge approach to superconductivity in cuprates in which the hole is decomposed as the product of a spinful neutral particle, the spinon, and a spinless charged particle, the holon. The statistics of each particle is modified by binding it to a gauge field providing a statistical flux, this approach being analogous to Chern-Simons bosonization. We thus obtain a model characterized by three characteristic temperatures corresponding, respectively, to the appearance of a finite density of incoherent holon pairs, of a finite density of incoherent spinon pairs and, finally, to the phase coherence leading to superconductivity. Specifically in the present Thesis within this model we study the superfluid density, demonstrating that the spinon and holon contributions sum according to a Ioffe-Larking-like rule, analogous to that they found for resistivity, showing excellent agreement with experimental data in the moderate underdoping up to optimal doping region. We also demonstrated that the formalism reproduces the quasi-universality observed in experimental data at different dopings and allows for an analytical derivation of a relation that approximates the Uemura relation for moderate dopings.
We theoretically study the thermodynamic properties of a strongly interacting Fermi gas at the crossover from a Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superfluid to a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), by applying a recently outlined strong-coupling theory that includes pair fluctuations beyond the commonly-used many-body
T -matrix or ladder approximation at the Gaussian level. The beyond Gaussian pair fluctuation (GPF) theory always respects the exact thermodynamic relations and recovers the Bogoliubov theory of molecules in the BEC limit with a nearly correct molecule-molecule scattering length. We show that the beyond-GPF theory predicts quantitatively accurate ground-state properties at the BEC-BCS crossover, in good agreement with the recent measurement by Horikoshi et al. in Phys. Rev. X 7, 041004 (2017). In the unitary limit with infinitely large
s -wave scattering length, the beyond-GPF theory predicts a reliable universal energy equation of state up to 0.6
Tc , where
Tc is the superfluid transition temperature at unitarity. The theory predicts a Bertsch parameter
ξ≃0.365 at zero temperature, in good agreement with the latest quantum Monte Carlo result
ξ=0.367(7) and the latest experimental measurement
ξ=0.367(9) . We attribute the excellent and wide applicability of the beyond-GPF theory in the broken-symmetry phase at sufficiently low temperatures to the empirically useful partial re-summation of Feynman diagrams following a dimensional
ϵ -expansion analysis near four dimensions (
d=4−ϵ ), which gives rise to accurate predictions at the second order
O(ϵ2) . Our work indicates the possibility of further improving the strong-coupling theory of strongly interacting fermions based on the systematic inclusion of large-loop Feynman diagrams at higher orders
O(ϵn) with
n≥3 .