BEC-BCS crossover of a trapped Fermi gas without using the local density approximation

Abstract

We perform a variational quantum Monte Carlo simulation of an interacting Fermi gas confined in a three dimensional harmonic potential. This gas is considered as the precursor system from which a molecular bosonic gas is formed. Based on the results of two-body calculations for trapped atoms, we propose a family of variational many-body wave functions that takes into account the qualitative different nature of the BCS and BEC regimes as a function of the scattering length. Energies, densities and correlation functions are calculated and compared with previous results for homogeneous gases. Universality tests at the unitarity limit are performed including the verification of the virial relation and the evaluation of the $\beta$ parameter.

10 pages, 3 figures, 1 table. This version includes calculations for all closed shells upto 440 atoms and we explored shorter potential ranges

References in corpus (3)

• Observation of Bose-Einstein Condensation of Molecules
• Crossover from a molecular Bose-Einstein condensate to a degenerate Fermi gas
• The potential energy of a ${}^{40}$K Fermi gas in the BCS-BEC crossover

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Universal properties of a trapped two-component Fermi gas at unitarity
• Energetics and Structural Properties of Trapped Two-Component Fermi Gases
• Small mass- and trap-imbalanced two-component Fermi systems
• Stability of Inhomogeneous Multi-Component Fermi Gases