Strongly paired fermions: Cold atoms and neutron matter

Abstract

Experiments with cold Fermi atoms can be tuned to probe strongly interacting fluids that are very similar to the low-density neutron matter found in the crusts of neutron stars. In contrast to traditional superfluids and superconductors, matter in this regime is very strongly paired, with gaps of the order of the Fermi energy. We compute the T=0 equation of state and pairing gap for cold atoms and low-density neutron matter as a function of the Fermi momentum times the scattering length. Results of quantum Monte Carlo calculations show that the equations of state are very similar. The neutron matter pairing gap at low densities is found to be very large but, except at the smallest densities, significantly suppressed relative to cold atoms because of the finite effective range in the neutron-neutron interaction.

5 pages, 4 figures; 3 references added; v2 corresponds to the published version

References in corpus (3)

• Vortices and Superfluidity in a Strongly Interacting Fermi Gas
• Observation of the Pairing Gap in a Strongly Interacting Fermi Gas
• Collective excitations of a degenerate gas at the BEC-BCS crossover

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Further explorations of Skyrme-Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov mass formulas. IX: Constraint of pairing force to ${}^1{S}_0$ neutron-matter gap
• Equation of state of superfluid neutron matter and the calculation of ${}^1{S}_0$ pairing gap
• Effective pairing interactions with isospin density dependence
• The Neutron Star Crust: Nuclear Physics Input
• Equation of state of low--density neutron matter and the ${}^1{S}_0$ pairing gap