Critical Behaviour in Trapped Strongly Interacting Fermi Gases

Abstract

We investigate the width of the Ginzburg critical region and experimental signatures of critical behavior in strongly interacting trapped Fermi gases close to unitarity, where the s-wave scattering length diverges. Despite the fact that the width of the critical region is of the order unity, evidence of critical behavior in the bulk thermodynamics of trapped gases is strongly suppressed by their inhomogeneity. The specific heat of a harmonically confined gas, for instance, is \textit{linear} in the reduced temperature $t=(T-T_{\mathrm{c}})/T_{\mathrm{c}}$ above $T_{\mathrm{c}}$. We also discuss the prospects of observing critical behavior in the local compressibility from measurements of the density profile.

6 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Quantum Fluctuations in the Superfluid State of the BCS-BEC Crossover
• Critical Behavior of a Trapped Interacting Bose Gas
• Measurement of the Entropy and Critical Temperature of a Strongly Interacting Fermi Gas
• Thermodynamics of a Trapped Unitary Fermi Gas
• Comparative study of strong coupling theories of a trapped Fermi gas at unitarity
• Popov approximation for composite bosons in the BCS-BEC crossover