High-Frequency Sound in a Unitary Fermi Gas

Thermography of the superfluid transition in a strongly interacting Fermi gas

Heat transport can serve as a fingerprint identifying different states of matter. In a normal liquid, a hotspot diffuses, whereas in a superfluid, heat propagates as a wave called "second sound." Direct imaging of heat transport is challenging, and one usually resorts to detecting secondary effects. In this study, we establish thermography of a strongly interacting atomic Fermi gas, whose radio-frequency spectrum provides spatially resolved thermometry with subnanokelvin resolution. The superfluid phase transition was directly observed as the sudden change from thermal diffusion to second-sound propagation and is accompanied by a peak in the second-sound diffusivity. This method yields the full heat and density response of the strongly interacting Fermi gas and therefore all defining properties of Landau's two-fluid hydrodynamics.

Testing universality of Feynman-Tan relation in interacting Bose gases using high-order Bragg spectra

The Feynman-Tan relation, obtained by combining the Feynman energy relation with the Tan's two-body contact, can explain the excitation spectra of strongly interacting ³⁹K Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). Since the shift of excitation resonance in the Feynman-Tan relation is inversely proportional to atomic mass, the test of whether this relation is universal for other atomic systems is significant for describing the effect of interaction in strongly correlated Bose gases. Here we measure the high-momentum excitation spectra of ¹³³Cs BEC with widely tunable interactions by using the second- and third-order Bragg spectra. We observe the backbending of frequency shift of excitation resonance with increasing interaction, and even the shift changes its sign under the strong interactions in the high-order Bragg spectra. Our finding shows good agreement with the prediction based on the Feynman-Tan relation. Our results provide significant insights for understanding the profound properties of strongly interacting Bose gases.

Excitation Spectrum and Superfluid Gap of an Ultracold Fermi Gas

Ultracold atomic gases are a powerful tool to experimentally study strongly correlated quantum many-body systems. In particular, ultracold Fermi gases with tunable interactions have allowed to realize the famous BEC-BCS crossover from a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of molecules to a Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superfluid of weakly bound Cooper pairs. However, large parts of the excitation spectrum of fermionic superfluids in the BEC-BCS crossover are still unexplored. In this work, we use Bragg spectroscopy to measure the full momentum-resolved low-energy excitation spectrum of strongly interacting ultracold Fermi gases. This enables us to directly observe the smooth transformation from a bosonic to a fermionic superfluid that takes place in the BEC-BCS crossover. We also use our spectra to determine the evolution of the superfluid gap and find excellent agreement with previous experiments and self-consistent T-matrix calculations both in the BEC and crossover regime. However, toward the BCS regime a calculation that includes the effects of particle-hole correlations shows better agreement with our data.

Tunneling Transport of Unitary Fermions across the Superfluid Transition

We investigate the transport of a Fermi gas with unitarity-limited interactions across the superfluid phase transition, probing its response to a direct current (dc) drive through a tunnel junction. As the superfluid critical temperature is crossed from below, we observe the evolution from a highly nonlinear to an Ohmic conduction characteristic, associated with the critical breakdown of the Josephson dc current induced by pair condensate depletion. Moreover, we reveal a large and dominant anomalous contribution to resistive currents, which reaches its maximum at the lowest attained temperature, fostered by the tunnel coupling between the condensate and phononic Bogoliubov-Anderson excitations. Increasing the temperature, while the zeroing of supercurrents marks the transition to the normal phase, the conductance drops considerably but remains much larger than that of a normal, uncorrelated Fermi gas tunneling through the same junction. We attribute such enhanced transport to incoherent tunneling of sound modes, which remain weakly damped in the collisional hydrodynamic fluid of unpaired fermions at unitarity.

Thermal conductivity of an ultracold Fermi gas in the BCS-BEC crossover

Recent experiments on sound waves in a unitary Fermi gas reveal many transport properties about strongly interacting fermions. Sound propagates through the coupling of momentum and heat transport, and attenuates strongly with the presence of a phase transition. In this work, focusing on the temperature regimes near and below the superfluid critical temperature [Formula: see text] in the BCS-BEC crossover, we present a Kubo-based microscopic calculation of thermal conductivity [Formula: see text], which has not attracted much attention compared to the shear viscosity. Our approach primarily addresses the contributions of the fermionic quasiparticles to thermal transport and our results return to the kinetic descriptions at high temperatures. [Formula: see text] drops upon crossing the pseudogap temperature [Formula: see text], and its temperature dependence changes below [Formula: see text]. The drops become more pronounced on the weakly coupled BCS side, where the Pauli blocking causes the upturn of [Formula: see text] above [Formula: see text]. Our calculations fit well with the sound measurement on the damping rate.