Macroscopic Periodic Tunneling of Fermi Atoms in the BCS-BEC Crossover

Abstract

We study the macroscopic quantum tunneling of two weakly-linked superfluids made of interacting fermionic atoms. We derive atomic Josephson junction equations and find that zero-mode and pi-mode frequencies of coherent atomic oscillations depend on the tunneling coefficient and the sound velocity of the superfluid. By considering a superfluid of ^40K atoms, we calculate these oscillation frequencies in the crossover from the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer state of weakly-bound Cooper pairs to the Bose-Einstein Condensate of strongly-bound molecular dimers.

6 pages 3 figures revtex

References in corpus (5)

• Observation of the Pairing Gap in a Strongly Interacting Fermi Gas
• Collective excitations of a degenerate gas at the BEC-BCS crossover
• Collective modes and ballistic expansion of a Fermi gas in the BCS-BEC crossover
• The Josephson effect throughout the BCS-BEC crossover
• Path integral formulation of the tunneling dynamics of a superfluid Fermi gas in an optical potential