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arXiv:cond-mat/0501728 · Physical Review A

Conventional character of the BCS-BEC crossover in ultracold gases of K40

Marzena Hanna Szymańska, Krzysztof Góral, Thorsten Köhler, Keith R. Burnett

Published Jul 19, 2005• 53 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We use the standard fermionic and boson-fermion Hamiltonians to study the BCS--BEC crossover near the 202 G resonance in a two-component mixture of fermionic $^{40}\mathrm{K}$ atoms employed in the experiment of Regal et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 040403 (2004)]. Our mean-field analysis of many-body equilibrium quantities shows virtually no differences between the predictions of the two approaches, provided they are both implemented in a manner that properly includes the effect of the highest excited bound state of the background scattering potential, rather than just the magnetic-field dependence of the scattering length. Consequently, we rule out the macroscopic occupation of the molecular field as a mechanism behind the fermionic pair condensation and show that the BCS-BEC crossover in ultracold $^{40}\mathrm{K}$ gases can be analyzed and understood on the same basis as in the conventional systems of solid state physics.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.72.013610

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We use the standard fermionic and boson-fermion Hamiltonians to study the BCS--BEC crossover near the 202 G resonance in a two-component mixture of fermionic 40K^{40}\mathrm{K}40K atoms employed in the experiment of Regal et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 040403 (2004)]. Our mean-field analysis of many-body equilibrium quantities shows virtually no differences between the predictions of the two approaches, provided they are both implemented in a manner that properly includes the effect of the highest excited bound state of the background scattering potential, rather than just the magnetic-field dependence of the scattering length. Consequently, we rule out the macroscopic occupation of the molecular field as a mechanism behind the fermionic pair condensation and show that the BCS-BEC crossover in ultracold 40K^{40}\mathrm{K}40K gases can be analyzed and understood on the same basis as in the conventional systems of solid state physics.
We systematically study the BCS-BEC crossover and the quantum phase transition in ultracold 6Li^{6}\mathrm{Li}6Li and 40K^{40}\mathrm{K}40K atoms across a wide Feshbach resonance. The background scattering lengths for 6Li^{6}\mathrm{Li}6Li and 40K^{40}\mathrm{K}40K have opposite signs, which lead to very different behaviors for these two types of atoms. For 40K^{40}\mathrm{K}40K, both the two-body and the many-body calculations show that the system always has two branches of solutions: one corresponds to a deeply bound molecule state; and the other, the one accessed by the current experiments, corresponds to a weakly bound state with population always dominantly in the open channel. For 6Li^{6}\mathrm{Li}6Li, there is only a unique solution with the standard crossover from the weakly bound Cooper pairs to the deeply bound molecules as one sweeps the magnetic field through the crossover region. Because of this difference, for the experimentally accessible state of 40K^{40}\mathrm{K}40K, there is a quantum phase transition at zero temperature from the superfluid to the normal Fermi gas at the positive detuning of the magnetic field where the sss-wave scattering length passes its zero point. For 6Li^{6}\mathrm{Li}6Li, however, the system changes continuously across the zero point of the scattering length. For both types of atoms, we also give a detailed comparison between the results from the two-channel and the single-channel model over the whole region of the magnetic field detuning.
We investigate the crossover from BCS pairing to molecular Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) in an atomic gas with two fermion species with masses ${m}_{\ensuremath{\uparrow}}\ensuremath{\ne}{m}_{\ensuremath{\downarrow}}$ tuned through a Feshbach resonance. We present results for the T=0T=0T=0 equation of state as a function of the scattering length including the effects of Gaussian fluctuations about the mean field ground state. We compute the ground state energy as a function of ${m}_{\ensuremath{\uparrow}}/{m}_{\ensuremath{\downarrow}}$ at unitarity and find excellent agreement with the quantum Monte Carlo result for ${m}_{\ensuremath{\uparrow}}/{m}_{\ensuremath{\downarrow}}=6.67$ for a 40K^{40}\mathrm{K}40K-6Li^{6}\mathrm{Li}6Li mixture. We show that the dimer scattering length in the BEC limit as a function of ${m}_{\ensuremath{\uparrow}}/{m}_{\ensuremath{\downarrow}}$ compares well with the exact four-body results of Petrov et al. [J. Phys. B 38, S645 (2005)]. We also derive the condition for trapping frequencies to obtain an unpolarized gas in a harmonic trap.
This thesis summarizes our study on the properties of ultracold Fermions near a Feshbach resonance. The Feshbach resonance allows for a continuous tuning of the interaction strength between the atoms. With this tunability, many properties predicted for the BCS-BEC crossover region in solids can be shown to exist in this ultracold Fermi gas. With the highly controllable parameters and the clean environment in the experiments, the study of the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) to Bose-Einstein Condensation (BEC) crossover in ultracold Fermions provides valuable insights to the strongly interacting crossover region, which has never been achieved before in solids. We first examine the properties of 6 Li and 40 K gases. We find that in the unitary region the properties of the system do not depend on the atom species: outside the unitary region, the properties of the system do depend on the scattering properties of the different atom species. We study the dynamics of the ultracold Fermions in the crossover region in response to the variations in the external magnetic field. We find that the response depends on the time scale and the amplitude of the variations; which is in qualitative agreement with the experimental observations. We derive a set of dynamic mean-field equations for a Fermi gas in an arbitrary potential trap near a wide Feshbach resonance. The equations are more general than the local density approximation (LDA), and less demanding computationally as the Bogoliubov-de-Gennes (BdG) equation. We then analyze the solubility of the equations, as well as solve a simplified version of the equations for illustration and for self-consistency check on the assumptions made during the derivation. We systematically study the possible phases for a trapped Fermi gas with population imbalance near a Feshbach resonance. Our results agree qualitatively well with the recent experimental results, and predict the existence of two exotic non-BCS superfluid phases for the strongly interacting gas with population unbalance: the Breached Pair (BP) phase and the Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) phase. Finally, to guide the experimental efforts in the search of new quantum phases, we propose a detection scheme for the possible exotic phases.
We investigate the non-universal behavior of the BCS-BEC crossover model at the normal to superfluid transition. By using a finite temperature quantum field theoretical approach due to Nozieres and Schmitt-Rink and by making the effective range expansion of the effective two-body interaction we numerically calculate the crossover transition temperature as a function of the scattering length, aF,a_{F},aF​, and the effective range parameter, re.r_{\mathrm{e}}.re​. In an ultracold two-component atomic Fermi gas BCS-BEC crossover physics is expected to appear near magnetic-field-induced Feshbach resonances. By matching two-body scattering properties near a Feshbach resonance to a simple renormalized model potential, a broad resonance is characterized by a small effective range and the gas displays a universal BCS-BEC crossover behavior. On the other hand, for a narrow resonance thermodynamic quantities depend the effective range which may be large and negative at resonance. For increasing values of −re-r_{\mathrm{e}}−re​ we find the transition temperature to be suppressed in the crossover region. We furthermore argue for existence of a lower bound of TcT_{c}Tc​ at fixed coupling for increasing −re-r_{\mathrm{e}}−re​ in the crossover region.
This thesis presents experiments probing physics in the crossover between Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) and BCS superconductivity using an ultracold gas of atomic fermions. Scattering resonances in these ultracold gases (known as Feshbach resonances) provide the unique ability to tune the fermion-fermion interactions. The work presented here pioneered the use of fermionic Feshbach resonances as a highly controllable and tunable system ideal for studying the cusp of the BCS-BEC crossover problem. Here pairs of fermionic atoms have some properties of diatomic molecules and some properties of Cooper pairs. I present studies of a normal Fermi gas at a Feshbach resonance and the work required to cool the gas to temperatures where superfluidity in the crossover is predicted. These studies culminated in our observation of a phase transition at the cusp of the BCS-BEC crossover through condensation of fermionic atom pairs. I also discuss subsequent work that confirmed the crossover nature of the pairs in these condensates.
Microscopic theories of Feshbach resonance phenomena in fermionic alkali-metal gases have, in the main, relied upon the intuition afforded by a ``Fermi-Bose'' theory which presents the Feshbach molecule as a featureless pointlike Bose particle. While this model may provide a suitable platform to explore the condensation phenomena in the 6Li^{6}\mathrm{Li}6Li system, it has been argued recently that its application to the 40K^{40}\mathrm{K}40K system, where the hyperfine structure is inverted, is inappropriate. Here, the formation of a Feshbach resonance involves the formation of a Feshbach molecule which shares a spin state with the open channel. In such an arrangement, the mechanism of condensate formation cannot escape the effects of Pauli exclusion. Building on a model three-state fermion Hamiltonian recently introduced by Parish et al. to describe the 40K^{40}\mathrm{K}40K system, we elucidate the mean-field structure of the model, investigate the internal structure of the condensate wave function in the crossover region, and develop a field theory of the transition.