Time-Dependent Density-Functional Theory for Trapped Strongly-Interacting Fermionic Atoms

TL;DR

This paper develops a time-dependent density-functional theory approach to study the dynamics of strongly interacting trapped Fermi gases, showing good agreement with experiments and highlighting the importance of corrections beyond hydrodynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a single-equation density-functional framework for dynamic analysis of strongly interacting Fermi gases, extending previous models.

Findings

Good agreement with experimental data in BCS-BEC crossover

Corrections to hydrodynamic approximation are significant

Applicable to systems with large atom numbers

Abstract

The dynamics of strongly interacting trapped dilute Fermi gases (dilute in the sense that the range of interatomic potential is small compared with inter-particle spacing) is investigated in a single-equation approach to the time-dependent density-functional theory. Our results are in good agreement with recent experimental data in the BCS-BEC crossover regime. It is also shown that the calculated corrections to the hydrodynamic approximation may be important even for systems with a rather large number of atoms.