The Emergence of Superfluidity in Ultracold Fermi Gases

Emma Laird, UQ

Recent experiments by Selim Jochim’s group at Heidelberg University have observed a few-body precursor of a phase transition from a normal fluid to a superfluid in a mesoscopic Fermi gas comprising as few as six interacting particles. The phase transition is heralded by the presence of Cooper pairs which they detect directly as correlations between particles of opposite spin and momentum at the Fermi surface. At the same time, FLEET CI Chris Vale’s group have been experimentally studying the many-body dynamics of a two-component Fermi gas following an interaction quench from the normal into the superfluid phase.

Motivated by both scenarios, we are theoretically investigating the dynamics of the emergence of superfluidity in a Fermi gas that has been quenched to strongly attractive interactions by probing the system from the few-body limit. In this talk, I will outline my initial progress towards this goal, which involves using a stochastic variational approach coupled with an explicitly correlated Gaussian basis to calculate the fermionic excitation spectra.