BCS-BEC Crossover in the Strongly Correlated Regime of ultra-cold Fermi gases

We study the BCS-BEC crossover in the strongly correlated regime of an ultra-cold rotating two component Fermi gas. Strong correlations are shown to generate an additional long-range interaction which results in a modified crossover region compared to the non-rotating situation. The two-particle correlation function reveals a smooth crossover between the s-wave paired fermionic fractional quantum Hall state and the bosonic Laughlin state.

This paper gives a survey of a diagrammatic approach for fermionic pairing fluctuations, which are relevant to the BCS-BEC crossover realized with ultracold Fermi gases. Emphasis will be given to the physical intuition about the relevant physical processes that can be associated with this approach. Specific results will be presented for thermodynamic and dynamical quantities, where a critical comparison with alternative diagrammatic approaches will also be attempted.

The close theoretical analogy between the physics of rapidly rotating atomic Bose condensates and the quantum Hall effect (i.e., a two dimensional electron gas in a strong magnetic field) was first pointed out ten years ago. As a consequence of this analogy, a large number of strongly correlated quantum Hall-type states have been predicted to occur in rotating Bose systems, and suggestions have been made how to manipulate and observe their fractional quasiparticle excitations...

Recently, the nature of Cooper pairs in the BCS-BEC crossover has regained attention due to the observation of a large fraction of preformed fermion pairs on the BCS side of the Feshbach resonance in ultracold atomic Fermi gases. While several theoretical explanations were proposed, the interpretations are still controversial. The root of the controversy is understanding what represents a Cooper pair in a correlated Fermi system. This paper discusses these issues at the most ...

We study the pair-breaking effect of rotation on a cold Fermi gas in the BCS-BEC crossover region. In the framework of BCS theory, which is supposed to be qualitatively correct at zero temperature, we find that in a trap rotating around a symmetry axis, three regions have to be distinguished: (A) a region near the rotational axis where the superfluid stays at rest and where no pairs are broken, (B) a region where the pairs are progressively broken with increasing distance fro...

This chapter presents the crossover from the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) state of weakly-correlated pairs of fermions to the Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of diatomic molecules in the atomic Fermi gas. Our aim is to provide a pedagogical review of the BCS-BEC crossover, with an emphasis on the basic concepts, particularly those that are not generally known or are difficult to find in the literature. We shall not attempt to give an exhaustive survey of current research ...

We experimentally investigate the first-order correlation function of a trapped Fermi gas in the two-dimensional BEC-BCS crossover. We observe a transition to a low-temperature superfluid phase with algebraically decaying correlations. We show that the spatial coherence of the entire trapped system can be characterized by a single temperature-dependent exponent. We find the exponent at the transition to be constant over a wide range of interaction strengths across the crossov...

We propose increasing the fractional quantum Hall gap of a rapidly rotating Bose gas by increasing the interatomic interactions via a Feshbach resonance. The generation of molecules by the resonance causes pair correlations to grow throughout the system effecting the ground state. By an extension of the usual Chern-Simons theory, built of composite atoms and molecules, we are able to account for these resonance effects. We find that the resulting ground state evolves from a L...

We investigate pairing in a strongly interacting two-component Fermi gas with positive scattering length. In this regime, pairing occurs at temperatures above the superfluid critical temperature; unbound fermions and pairs coexist in thermal equilibrium. Measuring the total number of these fermion pairs in the gas we systematically investigate the phases in the sectors of pseudogap and preformed-pair. Our measurements quantitatively test predictions from two theoretical model...

We address the finite temperature phase diagram of ultracold fermionic atoms across a Feshbach resonance based on a functional integral for an atom-molecule model. This allows to fully exploit the presence of the global symmetry of phase rotations, U(1). Both the equation of state and the classification of the thermodynamic phases are obtained from a symmetry consideration. We focus on the universal aspects associated to narrow and broad resonances, in turn connected by an ad...