A Fermi gas of atoms with resonant interactions is predicted to obey universal hydrodynamics, where the shear viscosity and other transport coefficients are universal functions of the density and temperature. At low temperatures, the viscosity has a universal quantum scale $\hbar n$ where $n$ is the density, while at high temperatures the natural scale is $p_T^3/\hbar^2$ where $p_T$ is the thermal momentum. We employ breathing mode damping to measure the shear viscosity at low temperature. At high temperature $T$, we employ anisotropic expansion of the cloud to find the viscosity, which exhibits precise $T^{3/2}$ scaling. In both experiments, universal hydrodynamic equations including friction and heating are used to extract the viscosity. We estimate the ratio of the shear viscosity to the entropy density and compare to that of a perfect fluid.
We determine the shear viscosity of the ultracold Fermi gas at unitarity in the normal phase using hydrodynamic expansion data. The analysis is based on a generalized fluid dynamic framework which ensures a smooth transition between the fluid dynamic core of the cloud and the ballistic corona. We use expansion data taken by Joseph et al. and measurements of the equation of state by Ku et al. We find that the shear viscosity to particle density ratio just above the critical temperature is $η/n|_{T_c}=0.41\pm 0.11$. We also obtain evidence that the shear viscosity to entropy density ratio has a …
We present the first ab initio determination of the shear viscosity eta of the Unitary Fermi Gas, based on finite temperature quantum Monte Carlo calculations and the Kubo linear-response formalism. We determine the temperature dependence of the shear viscosity to entropy density ratio eta/s. The minimum of eta/s appears to be located above the critical temperature for the superfluid-to-normal phase transition with the most probable value being eta/s approx 0.2 hbar/kB, which almost saturates the Kovtun-Son-Starinets universal value hbar/(4 pi kB).
We present an ab initio determination of the shear viscosity for the unitary Fermi gas based on finite temperature quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) calculations and the Kubo linear-response formalism. The results are confronted with the bound for the shear viscosity originating from hydrodynamic fluctuations. Assuming smoothness of the frequency dependent shear viscosity eta(omega), we show that the bound is violated in the low temperature regime and the violation occurs simultaneously with the onset of the Cooper paring in the system. In order to preserve the hydrodynamic bound in QMC eta(omega) has…
Determinations of the shear viscosity of trapped ultracold gases suffer from systematic, uncontrolled uncertainties related to the treatment of the dilute part of the gas cloud. In this work we present an analysis of expansion experiments based on a new method, anisotropic fluid dynamics, that interpolates between Navier-Stokes fluid dynamics at the center of the cloud and ballistic behavior in the dilute corona. We validate the method using a comparison between anisotropic fluid dynamics and numerical solutions of the Boltzmann equation. We then apply anisotropic fluid dynamics to the expansi…
We investigate the low-temperature behavior of the ratio between the shear viscosity ηand the entropy density s in the unitary Fermi gas by using a model based on the zero-temperature spectra of both bosonic collective modes and fermonic single-particle excitations. Our theoretical curve of η/s as a function of the temperature T is in qualitative agreement with the experimental data of trapped ultracold 6Li atomic gases. We find the minimum value η/s \simeq 0.44 (in units of \hbar/k_B) at the temperature T/T_F \simeq 0.27, with T_F the Fermi temperature.
We present a proposal to measure anisotropic shear viscosity in a strongly interacting, ultra-cold, unitary Fermi gas confined in a harmonic trap. We introduce anisotropy in this setup by strongly confining the gas in one of the directions with relatively weak confinement in the remaining directions. This system has a close resemblance to anisotropic strongly coupled field theories studied recently in the context of gauge-gravity duality. Computations in such theories (which have gravity duals) revealed that some of the viscosity components of the anisotropic shear viscosity tensor can be made…
We compute the shear viscosity of a two dimensional Fermi gas interacting via a short range potential with scattering length $a_{2d}$ in kinetic theory. We find that kinetic theory predicts that the shear viscosity to entropy density ratio of a strongly interacting two dimensional gas is comparable to that of the three dimensional unitary gas. We use our results to compute the damping of collective modes in a trapped Fermi gas, and compare to experimental data recently obtained in E. Vogt et al., arXiv:1111.1173.
The bulk viscosity determines dissipation during hydrodynamic expansion. It vanishes in scale invariant fluids, while a nonzero value quantifies the deviation from scale invariance. For the dilute Fermi gas the bulk viscosity is given exactly by the correlation function of the contact density of local pairs. As a consequence, scale invariance is broken purely by pair fluctuations. These fluctuations give rise also to logarithmic terms in the bulk viscosity of the high-temperature nondegenerate gas. For the quantum degenerate regime I report numerical Luttinger-Ward results for the contact corr…
We study the shear viscosity of a dilute Fermi gas as a function of the scattering length in the vicinity of the unitarity limit. The calculation is based on kinetic theory, which provides a systematic approach to transport properties in the limit in which the fugacity $z=nλ^3/2$ is small. Here, $n$ is the density of the gas and $λ$ is the thermal wave length of the fermions. At leading order in the fugacity expansion the shear viscosity is independent of density, and the minimum shear viscosity is achieved at unitarity. At the next order medium effects modify the scattering amplitude as well …
We confirm and expand on work by Chafin and Schaefer on hydrodynamic fluctuations in the unitary Fermi gas. Using the result for the equation of state from a recent MIT experiment, we derive lower bounds for η/n and η/s as a function of temperature. Re-analyzing recent quantum Monte Carlo data for the shear-viscosity spectral function we point out a possible resolution for the tension between the viscosity bound η/n> 0.3 from Chafin and Schaefer and the quantum Monte Carlo results η/n<0.2$ from Wlazlowski et al. near the critical temperature
In this work we establish constraints on the temperature dependence of the shear viscosity $η$ in the superfluid phase of a dilute Fermi gas in the unitary limit. Our results are based on analyzing experiments that measure the aspect ratio of a deformed cloud after release from an optical trap. We discuss how to apply the two-fluid formalism to the unitary gas, and provide a suitable parametrization of the equation of state. We show that in expansion experiments the difference between the normal and superfluid velocities remains small, and can be treated as a perturbation. We find that expansi…
We compute the viscosity spectral function of the dilute Fermi gas for different values of the s-wave scattering length $a$, including the unitarity limit $a\to\infty$. We perform the calculation in kinetic theory by studying the response to a non-trivial background metric. We find the expected structure consisting of a diffusive peak in the transverse shear channel and a sound peak in the longitudinal channel. At zero momentum the width of the diffusive peak is $ω_0\simeq (2ε)/(3η)$ where $ε$ is the energy density and $η$ is the shear viscosity. At finite momentum the spectral function approa…
We compute the shear viscosity of the unitary Fermi gas above the superfluid transition temperature, using a diagrammatic technique that starts from the exact Kubo formula. The formalism obeys a Ward identity associated with scale invariance which guarantees that the bulk viscosity vanishes identically. For the shear viscosity, vertex corrections and the associated Aslamazov-Larkin contributions are shown to be crucial to reproduce the full Boltzmann equation result in the high-temperature, low fugacity limit. The frequency dependent shear viscosity $η(ω)$ exhibits a Drude-like transport peak …
We calculate the ratio of the viscosity to the entropy density for both Bose and Fermi gases in the unitary limit using a new approach to the quantum statistical mechanics of gases based on the S-matrix. In the unitary limit the scattering length diverges and the S-matrix equals -1. For the fermion case we obtain eta/s > 4.7 times the proposed lower bound of \hbar/4 pi k_B which came from the AdS/CFT for gauge theories, consistent with the most recent experiments. For the bosonic case we present evidence that the gas undergoes a phase transition to a strongly interacting Bose-Einstein condensa…
We consider a system consisting of a strongly interacting, ultracold unitary Fermi gas under harmonic confinement. Our analysis suggests the possibility of experimentally studying, in this system, an anisotropic shear viscosity tensor driven by the anisotropy in the trapping potential. In particular, we suggest that this experimental setup could mimic some features of anisotropic geometries that have recently been studied for strongly coupled field theories which have a gravitational dual. Results using the AdS/CFT correspondence in these theories show that in systems with a background linear …
We measure the shear viscosity in a two-component Fermi gas of atoms, tuned to a broad s-wave collisional (Feshbach) resonance. At resonance, the atoms strongly interact and exhibit universal behavior, where the equilibrium thermodynamic properties and the transport coefficients are universal functions of the density $n$ and temperature $T$. We present a new calibration of the temperature as a function of global energy, which is directly measured from the cloud profiles. Using the calibration, the trap-averaged shear viscosity in units of $\hbar\,n$ is determined as a function of the reduced t…
We propose to use the energy absorption spectroscopy to measure the kinetic coefficients of unitary Fermi gases in a uniform potential. We show that in our scheme, the energy absorption spectrum is proportional to the dynamic structure factor of the system. The profile of the spectrum depends on the shear viscosity $η$, the thermal conductivity $κ$ and the superfluid bulk viscosity $ξ_3$. We show that extraction of these coefficients from the spectrum is achievable in present experiments.
We discuss the unitary Fermi gas made of dilute and ultracold atoms with an infinite s-wave inter-atomic scattering length. First we introduce an efficient Thomas-Fermi-von Weizsacker density functional which describes accurately various static properties of the unitary Fermi gas trapped by an external potential. Then, the sound velocity and the collective frequencies of oscillations in a harmonic trap are derived from extended superfluid hydrodynamic equations which are the Euler-Lagrange equations of a Thomas-Fermi-von Weizsacker action functional. Finally, we show that this amazing Fermi ga…
The dilute Fermi gas at unitarity is scale invariant and its bulk viscosity vanishes. We compute the leading contribution to the bulk viscosity when the scattering length is not infinite. A measure of scale breaking is provided by the ratio $(P-\frac{2}{3}{\cal E})/P$, where $P$ is the pressure and ${\cal E}$ is the energy density. In the high temperature limit this ratio scales as $\frac{zλ}{a}$, where $z$ is the fugacity, $λ$ is the thermal wave length, and $a$ is the scattering length. We show that the bulk viscosity $ζ$ scales as the second power of this parameter, $ζ\sim (\frac{zλ}{a})^2 …
We use harmonically trapped systems to find the leading gradient corrections of the supefluid local density approximation (SLDA) - a density functional theory (DFT) describing the unitary Fermi gas (UFG). We find the leading order correction to be negative, and predict the q^2 coefficient of the long-range static response c = 1.5(3) - a factor of two smaller than predicted by mean-field theory - thereby establishing a new and experimentally measurably universal constant.
We study systems of few two-component fermions interacting in a Harmonic Oscillator trap. The fermion-fermion interaction is generated in a finite basis with a unitary transformation of the exact two-body spectrum given by the Busch formula. The few-body Schrödinger equation is solved with the formalism of the No-Core Shell Model. We present results for a system of three fermions interacting at unitarity as well as for finite values of the S-wave scattering length $a_2$ and effective range $r_2$. Unitary systems with four and five fermions are also considered. We show that the many-body energi…
The bulk viscosity of two-component fermions with a zero-range interaction is revisited both in two and three dimensions. We first point out that the "standard" Kubo formula employed in recent studies has flaws to give rise to an unphysical divergent bulk viscosity even in a limit where it is supposed to vanish. The corrected Kubo formula as well as the sum rule is then carefully rederived so as to confirm that the bulk viscosity indeed vanishes in the free, unitarity, and dimer limits. We also discuss that the recently found discrepancy between the Kubo formalism and the kinetic theory for th…
The transport properties of one-dimensional Fermi gases at low-temperatures are often described by the Luttinger liquid (LL) model. However, to study dissipation one needs to examine interactions beyond the LL model. In this work we provide a simple model which allows for a direct microscopic calculation of the bulk viscosity, namely the one dimensional spin polarized p-wave Fermi gas. We calculate the bulk viscosity in both the high- and low-temperature limits. We find that the bulk viscosity is finite and consistent with the requirement of scale symmetry, in spite of the inherent integrabili…
The shear viscosity plays an important role in studies of transport phenomena in ultracold Fermi gases and serves as a diagnostic of various microscopic theories. Due to the complicated phase structures of population-imbalanced Fermi gases, past works mainly focus on unpolarized Fermi gases. Here we investigate the shear viscosity of homogeneous, population-imbalanced Fermi gases with tunable attractive interactions at finite temperatures by using a pairing fluctuation theory for thermodynamical quantities and a gauge-invariant linear response theory for transport coefficients. In the unitary …
Using $\varepsilon$-expansion technique we compute $η/s$, where $η$ is the shear viscosity, $s$ is the entropy density, of the normal phase of unitary Fermi gas in $d=4-\varepsilon$ dimensions to LO in $\varepsilon$. We use kinetic theory approach and solve transport equations for medium perturbed by a shear hydrodynamic flow. The collision integrals are calculated to $\varepsilon^2$ which is LO. The LO result is temperature independent with $η/\rm s\simeq (0.11/\varepsilon^2)(\hbar/k_B).$ The $d=3$ prediction for $η/\rm s$ exceeds the $\hbar/4 πk_B$ bound by a factor of about $1.4.$
We study hydrodynamic fluctuations in a non-relativistic fluid. We show that in three dimensions fluctuations lead to a minimum in the shear viscosity to entropy density ratio $η/s$ as a function of the temperature. The minimum provides a bound on $η/s$ which is independent of the conjectured bound in string theory, $η/s \geq \hbar/(4πk_B)$, where $s$ is the entropy density. For the dilute Fermi gas at unitarity we find $η/s\gsim 0.2\hbar$. This bound is not universal -- it depends on thermodynamic properties of the unitary Fermi gas, and on empirical information about the range of validity of…
Using kinetic theory, we calculate the shear viscosity and the spin diffusion coefficient as well as the associated relaxation times for a two-component Fermi gas in two dimensions, as a function of temperature, coupling strength, polarization, and mass ratio of the two components. It is demonstrated that the minimum value of the viscosity decreases with the mass ratio, since Fermi blocking becomes less efficient. We furthermore analyze recent experimental results for the quadrupole mode of a 2D gas in terms of viscous damping obtaining a qualitative agreement using no fitting parameters.
We investigate shock waves in the unitary Fermi gas by using the zero-temperature equations of superfluid hydrodynamics. We obtain analytical solutions for the dynamics of a localized perturbation of the uniform gas. These supersonic bright and subsonic dark solutions produce, after a transient time, an extremely large (divergent) density gradient: the shock. We calculate the time of formation of the shock and also simulate the space-time behavior of the waves by solving generalized hydrodynamic equations, which include a reliable dispersive regularization of the shock. We find that the shock …
We present a comparison between simulated dynamics of the unitary fermion gas using the superfluid local density approximation (SLDA) and a simplified bosonic model, the extended Thomas Fermi (ETF) with a unitary equation of state. Small amplitude fluctuations have similar dynamics in both theories for frequencies far below the pair breaking threshold and wave vectors much smaller than the Fermi momentum, and the low frequency linear responses match well for surprisingly large wave vectors, even up to the Fermi momentum. For non-linear dynamics such as vortex generation, the ETF provides a sem…
We investigate the role of the effective range on the bulk viscosity of $s$- and $p$-wave Fermi gases. At resonance, the presence of the effective range breaks the scale invariance of the system, and hence results in a non-zero bulk viscosity. However, we show that the effective range plays a very different role in the two cases. In the $s$-wave case, the role of the effective range is perturbative, and its contribution to the bulk viscosity vanishes in the limit of zero effective range. On the other hand, the effective range in $p$-wave Fermi gases leads to a non-zero bulk viscosity, even in …
The shear viscosity has been shown to be equal to the product of pressure and relaxation time in normal scale-invariant fluids, but the presence of superfluidity at low temperatures can alter the relation. By using the mean-field BCS-Leggett theory with a gauge-invariant linear response theory for unitary Fermi superfluids, we present an explicit relation between thermodynamic quantities, including the pressure and chemical potential, and transport coefficients, including the shear viscosity, superfluid density, and anomalous shear viscosity from momentum transfer via Cooper pairs. The relatio…
Many one-dimensional systems of experimental interest possess multiple bands arising from shallow confining potentials. In this work, we study a gas of weakly interacting fermions and show that the bulk viscosity is dramatically altered by the occupation of more than one band. The reasons for this are two-fold: a multichannel system is more easily displaced from equilibrium and the associated relaxation processes lead to more rapid equilibration than in the single channel case. We estimate the bulk viscosity in terms of the underlying microscopic interactions. The experimental relevance of thi…
We precisely measure the shear viscosity for a resonantly interacting Fermi gas as a function of temperature, from nearly the ground state through the superfluid phase transition at a critical temperature $T_c$. Using an iterative method to invert the data, we extract the {\it local} shear viscosity coefficient $α_S(θ)$ versus reduced temperature $θ$, revealing previously hidden features. We find that $α_S$ begins to decrease rapidly with decreasing $θ$ well above $T_c$, suggesting that preformed pairs play an important role. Further, we observe that the derivative $α_S'(θ)$ has a maximum at $…
We investigate the collective excitations of a harmonically trapped two-dimensional Fermi gas from the collisionless (zero sound) to the hydrodynamic (first sound) regime. The breathing mode, which is sensitive to the equation of state, is observed at a frequency two times the dipole mode frequency for a large range of interaction strengths and temperatures, and the amplitude of the breathing mode is undamped. This provides evidence for a dynamical SO(2,1) scaling symmetry of the two-dimensional Fermi gas. Moreover, we investigate the quadrupole mode to measure the shear viscosity of the two-d…
We measure the static shear viscosity $η$ in a two-component Fermi gas near a broad collisional (Feshbach) resonance, as a function of interaction strength and energy. We find that $η$ has both a quadratic and a linear dependence on the interaction strength $1/({k_{FI}a})$, where $a$ is the s-wave scattering length and $k_{FI}$ is the Fermi wave vector for an ideal gas at the trap center. For energies above the superfluid transition, the minimum in $η$ as a function of interaction strength is significantly shifted toward the BEC side of resonance, to $1/(k_{FI}a)\simeq 0.25$.
We present results from Monte Carlo calculations investigating the properties of the homogeneous, spin-balanced unitary Fermi gas in three dimensions. The temperature is varied across the superfluid transition allowing us to determine the temperature dependence of the chemical potential, the energy per particle and the contact density. Numerical artifacts due to finite volume and discretization are systematically studied, estimated, and reduced.
The shear viscosity tensor of the superfluid Fermi gas in p-wave state with weak interaction is calculated at low temperatures, by using the Boltzmann equation approach. We consider the transition probabilities for the binary, decay and coalescence processes. We show that only the binary processes are dominated at low temperatures and the components of shear viscosity η_xy, η_xx, η_yy are proportional to (1/T)^2, and η_xz, η_yz and η_zz are proportional to (1/T)^4 and (1/T)^6, respectively.
We consider two-component fermions with a zero-range interaction both in two and three dimensions and study their spectral functions of bulk and shear viscosities for an arbitrary scattering length. Here the Kubo formulas are systematically evaluated up to the second order in the quantum virial expansion applicable to the high-temperature regime. In particular, our computation of the bulk viscosity spectral function is facilitated by expressing it with the contact-contact response function, which can be measured experimentally under the periodic modulation of the scattering length. The obtaine…
We investigate the initiation and subsequent evolution of Crow instability in an inhomogeneous unitary Fermi gas using zero-temperature Galilei-invariant non-linear Schrödinger equation. Considering a cigar-shaped unitary Fermi gas, we generate the vortex-antivortex pair either by phase-imprinting or by moving a Gaussian obstacle potential. We observe that the Crow instability in a unitary Fermi gas leads to the decay of the vortex-antivortex pair into multiple vortex rings and ultimately into sound waves.
We investigate the temperature dependence of the shear viscosity and spin diffusion in a two-dimensional Fermi gas with contact interactions, as realized in ultra-cold atomic gases. We describe the transport coefficients in terms of a Boltzmann equation and present a full numerical solution for the degenerate gas. In contrast to previous works we take the medium effects due to finite density fully into account. This effect reduces the viscosity to entropy ratio, $η/s$, by a factor of three, and similarly for spin diffusion. The trap averaged viscosity agrees well with recent measurements by Vo…
We analytically study quantum dissipative dynamics described by the Caldirola-Kanai model with inter-particle interactions. We have found that the dissipative quantum dynamics of the Caldirola-Kanai model can be exactly mapped to a dissipationless quantum dynamics under a negative external harmonic potential, even when the particles are strongly interacting. In particular, we show that the mapping is valid for the unitary Fermi gas, which is relevant for cold atoms and nuclear matters.
We theoretically study the pairing behavior of the unitary Fermi gas in the normal phase. Our analysis is based on the static spin susceptibility, which characterizes the response to an external magnetic field. We obtain this quantity by means of the complex Langevin approach and compare our calculations to available literature data in the spin-balanced case. Furthermore, we present results for polarized systems, where we complement and expand our analysis at high temperature with high-order virial expansion results. The implications of our findings for the phase diagram of the spin-polarized …
We present an ab initio calculation of the shear viscosity as a function of interaction strength in a two-component unpolarized Fermi gas near the unitary limit, within a finite temperature quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) framework and using the Kubo linear-response formalism. The shear viscosity decreases as we tune the interaction strength 1/ak_F from the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer side of the Feshbach resonance towards Bose-Einstein condensation limit and it acquires the smallest value for 1/ak_F approx 0.4, with a minimum value of (eta/s)_min approx 0.2 hbar/k_B, which is about twice as small as …
Making use of the operator product expansion, we derive a general class of sum rules for the imaginary part of the single-particle self-energy of the unitary Fermi gas. The sum rules are analyzed numerically with the help of the maximum entropy method, which allows us to extract the single-particle spectral density as a function of both energy and momentum. These spectral densities contain basic information on the properties of the unitary Fermi gas, such as the dispersion relation and the superfluid pairing gap, for which we obtain reasonable agreement with the available results based on quan…
We analyze the contributions of Nambu-Goldstone modes to the shear viscosity of a superfluid atomic Fermi gas close to unitarity. We show that the low temperature experimental values of the shear viscosity to entropy ratio, $η/s$, are reproduced considering an effective shear viscosity which takes into account the collisions among Nambu-Goldstone bosons and the finite size of the optical trap. We predict that, for $T \lesssim 0.1 T_F$, $η/s$ should correlate with the size of the trap and linearly decrease with decreasing temperature. For $T \gtrsim 0.1 T_F$, we find agreement with the experime…
We non-perturbatively study pairing in the high-temperature regime of polarized unitary two-component Fermi gases by extracting the pair-momentum distribution and shot-noise correlations. Whereas the pair-momentum distribution allows us to analyze the propagation of pairs composed of one spin-up and one spin-down fermion, shot-noise correlations provide us with a tomographic insight into pairing correlations around the Fermi surfaces associated with the two species. Assuming that the dominant pairing patterns right above the superfluid transition also govern the formation of condensates in the…
The crossover from weak coupling Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) pairing to a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of tightly bound pairs, as a function of the attractive interaction in Fermi systems, has long been of interest to theoretical physicists. The past decade has seen a series of remarkable experimental developments in ultracold Fermi gases that has realized the BCS-BEC crossover in the laboratory, bringing with it fresh new insights into the very strongly interacting unitary regime in the middle of this crossover. In this review, we start with a pedagogical introduction to the crossover a…
We have considered the orbital-free approximation of the kinetic energy functional to investigate the zero temperature properties of dilute harmonically trapped two component Fermi gas at unitarity. It is shown that our approach provides a realible and inexpensive method to study superfluid strongly interacting dilute Fermi gases.
The $p$-wave superfluid state is a promising spin-triplet and non $s$-wave pairing state in an ultracold Fermi gas. In this work we study the low-temperature shear viscosity of a one-component $p$-wave superfluid Fermi gas, by means of Kubo formalism. Our study is done in the strong-coupling limit where Fermi superfluid reduces into a system of composite bosons. Taking into account ${{p}_{x}}$-wave Cooper channel in the self-energy, the viscous relaxation rates are determined. The relaxation rates related to these interactions are calculated as a function of temperature. Their temperature depe…
Fermi gases with short-range interactions are ubiquitous in ultracold atomic systems. In the absence of spin-flipping processes the number of atoms in each spin species is conserved separately, and we discuss the associated Ward identities. For contact interactions the spin conductivity spectral function sigma_s(omega) has universal power-law tails at high frequency. We derive the spin f-sum rule and show that it is not affected by these tails in d<4 dimensions. Likewise the shear viscosity spectral function eta(omega) has universal tails; in contrast they modify the viscosity sum rule in a ch…
We discuss the pseudogap regime in the cold atomic unitary Fermi gas, with a particular emphasis on the auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (AFMC) approach. We discuss possible signatures of the pseudogap, review experimental results, and survey analytic and quantum Monte Carlo techniques before focusing on AFMC calculations in the canonical ensemble. For the latter method, we discuss results for the heat capacity, energy-staggering pairing gap, spin susceptibility, and compare to experiment and other theoretical methods.
We consider the operator product expansions for unitarity fermions. We compute the dynamic structure factor S(q,w) at large frequency and wavenumber away from the one-particle peak. The overall normalization of S(q,w) is determined by Tan's contact parameter, and the dependence on q and w is obtained in closed analytic form. We also find energy deposited into the system by small, rapid variations of the inverse scattering length.
We theoretically investigate the thermo-particle transport properties of an unitary Fermi gas be- tween two reservoirs connected by a quantum point contact. We find several distinguished properties that are qualitatively different from those of weak or non-interacting gas systems. The particle trans- port figure of merit is drastically enhanced in the unitary regime and it increases as the transmission coefficient increases, exactly opposite to the behavior in the weak or non-interacting gas systems. The Lorentz number violates the Wiedemann-Franz law, demonstrating the breakdown of Fermi liqu…
We theoretically investigate the shear viscosity $η$ in the BCS-BEC crossover regime of an ultracold Fermi gas with a Feshbach resonance. Within the framework of the strong-coupling self-consistent $T$-matrix approximation, we examine how a strong pairing interaction associated with a Feshbach resonance affects this transport coefficient, in the normal state above the superfluid phase transition temperature $T_{\rm c}$. We show that, while $η$ diverges in both the weak-coupling BCS and strong-coupling BEC limits, it becomes small in the unitary regime. The minimum of $η$ is obtained, not at th…
We study the real-time motion of a microscopic object in a cold Fermi gas at unitary conditions by using an extended Thomas-Fermi density functional approach. We find that spontaneous creation of singly quantized vortex-antivortex pairs occurs as a critical velocity is exceeded, which leads to a drag between the moving object and the Fermi gas. The resulting force is linear in the velocity for subsonic motion and becomes quadratic for supersonic motion.
One-dimensional Bose and Fermi gases with contact interactions are known to exhibit the weak-strong duality, where the equilibrium thermodynamic properties of one system at weak coupling are identical to those of the other system at strong coupling. Here, we show that such duality extends beyond the thermodynamics to the frequency-dependent complex bulk viscosity, which is provided by the contact-contact response function. In particular, we confirm that the bulk viscosities of the Bose and Fermi gases agree in the high-temperature limit, where the systematic expansion in terms of fugacity is a…
We study the extended Thomas-Fermi (ETF) density functional of the superfluid unitary Fermi gas. This functional includes a gradient term which is essential to describe accurately the surface effects of the system, in particular with a small number of atoms, where the Thomas-Fermi (local density) approximation fails. We find that our ETF functional gives density profiles which are in good agreement with recent Monte Carlo results and also with a more sophisticated superfluid density functional based on Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations. In addition, by using extended hydrodynamics equations of su…
