Normal-Superfluid Interface for Polarized Fermion Gases

Abstract

Recent experiments on imbalanced fermion gases have proved the existence of a sharp interface between a superfluid and a normal phase. We show that, at the lowest experimental temperatures, a temperature difference between N and SF phase can appear as a consequence of the blocking of energy transfer across the interface. Such blocking is a consequence of the existence of a SF gap, which causes low-energy normal particles to be reflected from the N-SF interface. Our quantitative analysis is based on the Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov-de Gennes formalism, which allows us to give analytical expressions for the thermodynamic properties and characterize the possible interface scattering regimes, including the case of unequal masses. Our central result is that the thermal conductivity is exponentially small at the lowest experimental temperatures.

11 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Local Density Functional Theory for Superfluid Fermionic Systems: The Unitary Gas
• Normal-Superfluid Interface Scattering For Polarized Fermion Gases
• Phase separation in imbalanced fermion superfluids beyond mean-field
• Density profiles of polarized Fermi gases confined in harmonic traps
• Collective Excitations of Trapped Imbalanced Fermion Gases
• Coupling of hydrodynamics and quasiparticle motion in collective modes of superfluid trapped Fermi gases