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

This report adresses topics and questions of common interest in the fields of ultra-cold gases and nuclear physics in the context of the BCS-BEC crossover. The BCS-BEC crossover has recently been realized experimentally, and essentially in all of its aspects, with ultra-cold Fermi gases. This realization, in turn, has raised the interest of the nuclear physics community in the crossover problem, since it represents an unprecedented tool to test fundamental and unanswered ques...

The subject of BCS - Bose Einstein condensation (BEC) crossover is particularly exciting because of its realization in ultracold Fermi gases and its possible relevance to high temperature superconductors. In the paper we review that body of theoretical work on this subject which represents a natural extension of the seminal papers by Leggett and by Nozieres and Schmitt-Rink (NSR). The former addressed only the ground state, now known as the "BCS-Leggett" wave-function and the...

We review the BCS to Bose Einstein condensation (BEC) crossover scenario which is based on the well known crossover generalization of the BCS ground state wavefunction $\Psi_0$. While this ground state has been summarized extensively in the literature, this Review is devoted to less widely discussed issues: understanding the effects of finite temperature, primarily below $T_c$, in a manner consistent with $\Psi_0$. Our emphasis is on the intersection of two important problems...

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, $a_{F},$ and the effective range parameter, $r_{\mathrm{e}}.$ In an ultracold two-com...

The nature of the normal state of an ultracold Fermi gas in the BCS-BEC crossover regime is an intriguing and controversial topic. While the many-body ground state remains a condensate of paired fermions, the normal state must evolve from a Fermi liquid to a Bose gas of molecules as a function of the interaction strength. How this occurs is still largely unknown. We explore this question with measurements of the distribution of single-particle energies and momenta in a nearly...

A review on superfluidity and the BEC-BCS crossover in ultracold Fermi gases.

A review of recent BEC-BCS crossover experiments in ultracold Fermi gases is given with particular emphasis on the work performed with lithium-6 at the University of Innsbruck.

We demonstrate the experimental feasibility of incompressible fractional quantum Hall-like states in ultra-cold two dimensional rapidly rotating dipolar Fermi gases. In particular, we argue that the state of the system at filling fraction $\nu =1/3$ is well-described by the Laughlin wave function and find a substantial energy gap in the quasiparticle excitation spectrum. Dipolar gases, therefore, appear as natural candidates of systems that allow to realize these very interes...

We show that the long-distance behavior of the two-body density correlation functions and the Cooper-pair probability density of a balanced mixture of a two-component Fermi gas at $T = 0$, is universal along the BEC-BCS crossover. Our result is demonstrated by numerically solving the mean-field BCS model for different finite short-range atomic interaction potentials. We find an analytic expression for the correlation length in terms of the chemical potential and the energy ga...

The condensation of fermion pairs lies at the heart of superfluidity. However, for strongly correlated systems with reduced dimensionality the mechanisms of pairing and condensation are still not fully understood. In our experiment we use ultracold atoms as a generic model system to study the phase transition from a normal to a condensed phase in a strongly interacting quasi-two-dimensional Fermi gas. Using a novel method, we obtain the in situ pair momentum distribution of t...