Suppression of Superfluidity upon Overflow of Trapped Fermions. Quantal and Thomas-Fermi Studies

TL;DR

This paper investigates how fermionic superfluidity is suppressed during overflow from narrow to wide containers and introduces a Thomas-Fermi approach that outperforms the Local Density Approximation in inhomogeneous superfluid systems.

Contribution

It presents a detailed analysis of superfluid suppression at overflow points and develops a Thomas-Fermi method for inhomogeneous superfluid Fermi-systems, surpassing LDA accuracy.

Findings

Superfluid pairing is significantly suppressed at overflow points.

The Thomas-Fermi approach accurately models inhomogeneous superfluid systems.

The method outperforms the Local Density Approximation in relevant cases.

Abstract

Two issues are treated in this work: (i) the generic fact that if a fermionic superfluid in the BCS regime overflows from a narrow container into a much wider one, pairing is much suppressed at the overflow point. Physical examples where this feature may play an important role are discussed (ii) A Thomas-Fermi (TF) approach to inhomogeneous superfluid Fermi-systems is presented and shown that it works well in cases where the Local Density Approximation (LDA) breaks down.