We study the phase diagram of the dilute two-component Fermi gas at zero temperature as a function of the polarization and coupling strength. We map out the detailed phase separations between superfluid and normal states near the Feshbach resonance. We show that there are three different coexistence of superfluid and normal phases corresponding to phase separated states between: (I) the partially polarized superfluid and the fully polarized normal phases, (II) the unpolarized superfluid and the fully polarized normal phases and (III) the unpolarized superfluid and the partially polarized normal phases from strong-coupling BEC side to weak-coupling BCS side. For pairing between two species, we found this phase separation regime gets wider and moves toward the BEC side for the majority species are heavier but shifts to BCS side and becomes narrow if they are lighter.
We consider an ideal gas of Bose and Fermi atoms in a harmonic trap, with a Feshbach resonance in the interspecies atomic scattering that can lead to formation of fermionic molecules. We map out the phase diagram for this three-component mixture in chemical and thermal equilibrium. Considering adiabatic association and dissociation of the molecules, we identify a possible cooling cycle, which in ideal circumstances can yield an exponential increase of the phase-space density.
In the wake of successful experiments in Fermi condensates, experimental attention is broadening to study resonant interactions in degenerate Bose-Fermi mixtures. Here we consider the properties and stability of the fermionic molecules that can be created in such a mixture near a Feshbach resonance (FR). To do this, we consider the two-body scattering matrix in the many-body environment, and assess its complex poles. The stability properties of these molecules strongly depend on their centre-of-mass motion, because they must satisfy Fermi statistics. At low centre-of-mass momenta the molecules…
We investigate the strongly interacting regime in an optically trapped $^6$Li Fermi mixture near a Feshbach resonance. The resonance is found at $800(40) $G in good agreement with theory. Anisotropic expansion of the gas is interpreted by collisional hydrodynamics. We observe an unexpected and large shift ($80 $G) between the resonance peak and both the maximum of atom loss and the change of sign of the interaction energy.
We propose a coherent framework allowing to deal with many-body effects in dense ultracold Fermi gases in the presence of a Feshbach resonance. We show that the simple effect of Pauli exclusion induces a strong modification of the basic scattering properties, leading in particular to an energy dependence of the effective scattering length on the scale of the chemical potential. This results in a smearing of the Feshbach resonance and provides a natural explanation for recent experimental findings.
We show that, apart from a difference in scale, all of the surprising recently observed properties of a degenerate Fermi gas near a Feshbach resonance persist in the high temperature Boltzmann regime. In this regime, the Feshbach resonance is unshifted. By sweeping across the resonance, a thermal distribution of bound states (molecules) can be reversibly generated. Throughout this process, the interaction energy is negative and continuous. We also show that this behavior must persist at lower temperatures unless there is a phase transition as the temperature is lowered. We rigorously demonstra…
In some recent experiments an ultracold gas of $^{40}$K$_2$ (or $^{6}$Li$_2$) molecules has been produced from a degenerate two-component Fermi gas of $^{40}$K (or $^{6}$Li) atoms by adiabatic passage through a Feshbach resonance. The maximum atom-molecule transfer efficiency is reported to be about 50%. We propose a simple microscopic model to characterize the ground state of the gas in the vicinity of the resonance, and show that the term describing the atom-molecule coupling is responsible for the observed efficiency 50%. Our result also suggests that the experiments have produced a molecul…
We consider a two-species degenerate Fermi gas coupled by a diatomic Feshbach resonance. We show that the resulting superfluid can exhibit a form of coherent BEC-to-BCS oscillations in response to a nonadiabatic change in the system's parameters, such as for example a sudden shift in the position of the Feshbach resonance. In the narrow resonance limit, the resulting soliton-like collisionless dynamics can be calculated analytically. In equilibrium the thermodynamics can be accurately computed across the full range of BCS-BEC crossover, with corrections controlled by the ratio of the resonance…
For calculating low-energy properties of a dilute gas of atoms interacting via a Feshbach resonance, we develop an effective theory in which the parameters that enter are an atom-molecule coupling strength and the magnetic moment of the molecular resonance. We demonstrate that for resonances in the fermionic systems $^{6}$Li and $^{40}$K that are under experimental investigation, the coupling is so strong that many-body effects are appreciable even when the resonance lies at an energy large compared with the Fermi energy. We calculate a number of many-body effects, including the effective mass…
We consider a dense ultracold Fermi gas in the presence of a Feshbach resonance. We investigate how the treshold for bound state formation, which is just at the Feshbach resonance for a dilute gas, is modified due to the presence of the Fermi sea. We make use of a preceding framework of handling this many-body problem. We restrict ourselves to the simple case where the chemical potential $ μ$ is negative, which allows us to cover in particular the classical limit where the effect is seen to disappear. We show that, within a simple approach where basically only the effect of Pauli exclusion is …
We analyze molecular bound states of atomic quantum gases near a Feshbach resonance. A simple, renormalizable field theoretic model is shown to have exact solutions in the two-body sector, whose binding energy agrees well with observed experimental results in both Bosonic and Fermionic cases. These solutions, which interpolate between BEC and BCS theories, also provide a more general variational ansatz for resonant superfluidity and related problems.
We perform an analysis of recent experimental measurements and improve the lithium interaction potentials. For $^6$Li a consistent description can be given. We discuss theoretical uncertainties for the position of the wide $^6$Li Feshbach resonance, and we present an analytic scattering model for this resonance, based on the inclusion of a field-dependent virtual open-channel state. We predict new Feshbach resonances for the $^6$Li-$^7$Li system, and their importance for different types of crossover superfluidity models is discussed.
We consider a single vortex in a superfluid Fermi gas in the BCS-BEC crossover regime near a Feshbach resonance. The effect of the molecular Bose-Einstein condensate upon the vortex structure is discussed within the mean field approximation at zero temperature. Using the self-consistent Bogoliubov-de Gennes equation of the fermion-boson coupled model, we calculate density distributions of atoms and molecules. As the number of the molecules increases, both atomic and molecular density changes from BCS-like distribution to BEC-like. We also study the change of the vortex core size in the crossov…
We consider the normal state of a dense ultracold atomic Fermi gas in the presence of a Feshbach resonance. We study the BCS and the molecular instabilities and their interplay, within the framework of a recent many-body approach. We find surprisingly that, in the temperature domain where the BCS phase is present, there is a non zero lower bound for the binding energy of molecules at rest. This could give an experimental mean to show the existence of the BCS phase without observing it directly.
Three magnetic-field induced heteronuclear Feshbach resonances were identified in collisions between bosonic 87Rb and fermionic 40K atoms in their absolute ground states. Strong inelastic loss from an optically trapped mixture was observed at the resonance positions of 492, 512, and 543 +/- 2 G. The magnetic-field locations of these resonances place a tight constraint on the triplet and singlet cross-species scattering lengths, yielding -281 +/- 15 Bohr and -54 +/- 12 Bohr, respectively. The width of the loss feature at 543 G is 3.7 +/- 1.5 G wide; this broad Feshbach resonance should enable e…
The entropy and kinetic, potential, and interaction energies of an atomic Fermi gas in a trap are studied under the assumption of thermal equilibrium for finite temperature. A Feshbach resonance can cause the fermions to pair into diatomic molecules. The entropy and energies of mixtures of such molecules with unpaired atoms are calculated, in relation to recent experiments on molecular Bose-Einstein condensates produced in this manner. It is shown that, starting with a Fermi gas of temperature $T= 0.1 T_F^0$, where $T_F^0$ is the non-interacting Fermi temperature, an extremely cold degenerate …
We explain why the experimental efficiency observed in the conversion of ultracold Fermi gases of $^{40}$K and $^{6}$Li atoms into diatomic Bose gases is limited to 0.5 when the Feshbach resonance sweep rate is sufficiently slow to pass adiabatically through the Landau Zener transition but faster than ``the collision rate'' in the gas, and increases beyond 0.5 when it is slower. The 0.5 efficiency limit is due to the preparation of a statistical mixture of two spin-states, required to enable s-wave scattering. By constructing the many-body state of the system we show that this preparation yiel…
We study a dilute mixture of degenerate bosons and fermions across a Feshbach resonance of the Fermi-Fermi scattering length $a_F$. This scattering length is renormalized by the boson-induced interaction between fermions and its value is crucial to determine the phase diagram of the system. For the mixture in a box and a positive Bose-Fermi scattering length, we show that there are three possibilities: a single uniform mixed phase, a purely fermionic phase coexisting with a mixed phase, and a purely fermionic phase coexisting with a purely bosonic one. As $1/a_F$ is increased from a negative v…
We study theoretically the ultracold two-component Fermi gases when a gradient magnetic field is used to tune the scattering length between atoms. For Li6 at the narrow resonance B0=543.25G, it is shown that the gases would be in a coexistence of the regimes of BCS, BEC and unitarity limit with the present experimental technique. In the case of thermal and chemical equilibrium, we investigate the density distribution of the gases and show that a double peak of the density distribution can give us a clear evidence for the coexistence of BCS, BEC and unitarity limit.
We present a consistent nonequilibrium theory for the production of molecular dimers from a two-component quantum-degenerate fermion atomic gas, via a linear downward sweep of the magnetic field across a Feshbach resonance. This problem raises interest because it is presently unclear as to why deviations from the universal Landau-Zener formula for the transition probability at two-level crossing are observed in the experimentally measured production efficiencies. We show that the molecular conversion efficiency is represented by a power series in terms of a dimensionless parameter which, in th…
We consider a two-component system of Fermi atoms and molecular bosons in the vicinity of a Feshbash resonance. We derive an effective action for the system, which has a term describing coherent tunneling of the molecular bosons into Cooper pairs and vice versa. In the equilibrium state, global phase coherence may be destroyed by thermal or quantum phase fluctuations. In the non-equilibrium regime, the system may show an internal AC Josephson effect leading to real time oscillations in the number of molecular bosons.
At the location of a magnetic-field Feshbach resonance, a mixture gas of fermionic atoms and dimers of fermionic atom pairs is investigated in the unitarity limit where the absolute value of the scattering length is much larger than the mean distance between atoms. The dynamic equilibrium of the mixture gases is characterized by the minimum of the Gibbs free energy. For the fermionic atoms and dimers with divergent scattering length, it is found that the fraction of the dimers based on a very simple theory agrees with the high fraction of zero-momentum molecules observed in a recent experiment…
We test a non equilibrium approach to study the behavior of a Bose-Fermi mixture of alkali atoms in the presence of a Feshbach resonance between bosons and fermions. To this end we derive the Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov (HFB) equations of motion for, the interacting system. This approach has proven very successful in the study of resonant systems composed of Bose particles and Fermi particles. However, when applied to a Bose-Fermi mixture, the HFB theory fails to identify even the correct binding energy of molecules in the appropriate limit. Through a more rigorous analysis we are able to ascribe …
We model collisionless collective conversion of a degenerate Fermi gas into bosonic molecules via a Feshbach resonance, treating the bosonic molecules as a classical field and seeding the pairing amplitudes with random phases. A dynamical instability of the Fermi sea against association into molecules initiates the conversion. The model qualitatively reproduces several experimental observations {[Regal et al., Nature {\bf 424}, 47 (2003)]}. We predict that the initial temperature of the Fermi gas sets the limit for the efficiency of atom-molecule conversion.
We study a model of two species of one-dimensional linearly dispersing fermions interacting via an s-wave Feshbach resonance at zero temperature. While this model is known to be integrable, it possesses novel features that have not previously been investigated. Here, we present an exact solution based on the coordinate Bethe Ansatz. In the limit of infinite resonance strength, which we term the strongly interacting limit, the two species of fermions behave as free Fermi gases. In the limit of infinitely weak resonance, or the weakly interacting limit, the gases can be in different phases depen…
We investigate strong coupling effects on the superfluid phase transition in a gas of Fermi atoms with a Feshbach resonance. The Feshbach resonance describes a composite quasi-Boson, which can give rise to an additional pairing interaction between the Fermi atoms. This attractive interaction becomes stronger as the threshold energy of the Feshbach resonance two-particle bound state is lowered. In a recent paper, we showed that in the uniform Fermi gas, this tunable pairing interaction naturally leads to a BCS-BEC crossover of the Nozi`eres and Schmitt-Rink kind, in which the BCS-type superflui…
We discuss the BCS-BEC crossover in a degenerate Fermi gas of two hyperfine states interacting close to a Feshbach resonance. This system has quasi-molecular Bosons associated with a Feshbach resonance, and this kinds of coupled Boson-Fermion model has been recently applied to Fermi atomic gases within a mean-field approximation. We show that by including fluctuation contribution to the free energy similar to that condiered by Nozi'eres and Schmitt-Rink, the character of the superfluid phase transition continuously changes from the BCS-type to the BEC-type, as the threshold of the quasi-molecu…
We map out the detuning-magnetization phase diagram for a ``magnetized'' (unequal number of atoms in two pairing hyperfine states) gas of fermionic atoms interacting via an s-wave Feshbach resonance (FR). For large positive FR detuning a normal magnetized Fermi gas is stable above an exponentially small value of the population difference. Below this critical value the phase diagram is dominated by coexistence of a magnetized normal gas and a singlet paired superfluid with the latter exhibiting a BCS-Bose Einstein condensate crossover with reduced detuning. On the BCS side of strongly overlappi…
