Probing the dynamic structure factor of a neutral Fermi superfluid along the BCS-BEC crossover using atomic impurity qubits

TL;DR

This paper proposes using impurity qubits trapped in a potential within a Fermi superfluid to noninvasively probe the superfluid's density fluctuations and excitation spectra across the BCS-BEC crossover.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method employing impurity vibrational states as quantum probes to study the dynamic structure factor of a Fermi superfluid.

Findings

Impurity dynamics reveal the superfluid's density fluctuations.

The method enables nondestructive measurement of the superfluid order parameter.

The setup models an open quantum system with coupled bosonic and fermionic excitations.

Abstract

We study an impurity atom trapped by an anharmonic potential, immersed within a cold atomic Fermi gas with attractive interactions that realizes the crossover from a Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superfluid to a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). Considering the qubit comprising the lowest two vibrational energy eigenstates of the impurity, we demonstrate that its dynamics probes the equilibrium density fluctuations encoded in the dynamic structure factor of the superfluid. Observing the impurity's evolution is thus shown to facilitate nondestructive measurements of the superfluid order parameter and the contact between collective and single-particle excitation spectra. Our setup constitutes a novel model of an open quantum system interacting with a thermal reservoir, the latter supporting both bosonic and fermionic excitations that are also coupled to each other.