Quantum criticality and universal scaling of strongly attractive spin-imbalanced Fermi gases in a 1D harmonic trap

TL;DR

This paper explores the thermodynamics and quantum critical behavior of strongly attractive, spin-imbalanced Fermi gases in a 1D harmonic trap, revealing universal physics and experimental observability of quantum criticality.

Contribution

It provides analytic results for thermodynamics of 1D attractive Fermi gases and demonstrates their experimental accessibility for studying quantum critical phenomena.

Findings

Universal Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid physics can be measured in current experiments.

Quantum criticality features are observable in the phase diagram of spin-imbalanced Fermi gases.

The results offer insights into recent experimental measurements and suggest further studies of quantum critical phenomena.

Abstract

We investigate thermodynamics and quantum criticality of strongly attractive Fermi gases confined in a one-dimensional (1D) harmonic trap. Finite temperature density profiles, entropy, compressibility and susceptibility of the trapped gas are studied using analytic results for the thermodynamics within the local density approximation. We demonstrate that current experiments are capable of measuring universal Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid physics and quantum criticality of 1D strongly interacting Fermi gases. The results provide insights on recent measurements of key features of the phase diagram of a spin-imbalanced atomic Fermi gas [Liao et al., Nature 467, 567 (2010)] and point to further study of quantum critical phenomena in ultracold atomic Fermi gases.