A strongly interacting Bose gas: Nozi\`eres and Schmitt-Rink theory and beyond

TL;DR

This paper investigates the critical temperature and stability of a strongly interacting Bose gas near a Feshbach resonance, revealing pair formation effects that suppress the transition temperature and lead to potential instability.

Contribution

It extends Nozieres and Schmitt-Rink theory to include pair interactions in Bose gases, analyzing stability and critical temperature across the Feshbach resonance.

Findings

Pair formation suppresses the critical temperature.

The gas remains mechanically stable without pair interactions.

Including pair interactions indicates potential instability near the critical temperature.

Abstract

We calculate the critical temperature for Bose-Einstein condensation in a gas of bosonic atoms across a Feshbach resonance, and show how medium effects at negative scattering lengths give rise to pairs reminiscent of the ones responsible for fermionic superfluidity. We find that the formation of pairs leads to a large suppression of the critical temperature. Within the formalism developed by Nozieres and Schmitt-Rink the gas appears mechanically stable throughout the entire crossover region, but when interactions between pairs are taken into account we show that the gas becomes unstable close to the critical temperature. We discuss prospects of observing these effects in a gas of ultracold Cs133 atoms where recent measurements indicate that the gas may be sufficiently long-lived to explore the many-body physics around a Feshbach resonance.