Bragg scattering of light in a strongly interacting trapped Fermi gas of atoms

TL;DR

This paper investigates how Bragg scattering can be used to detect the superfluid pairing gap in a strongly interacting trapped Fermi gas, demonstrating that the gap is observable in the unitarity limit but not in the weak-coupling BCS limit.

Contribution

It provides a theoretical calculation of the dynamic structure function for a superfluid Fermi gas at unitarity, showing the detectability of the pairing gap via Bragg spectroscopy.

Findings

Superfluid pairing gap is detectable in the unitarity limit using Bragg spectroscopy.

In the weak-coupling BCS limit, the pairing gap cannot be detected through this method.

The study uses local density approximation to model the system.

Abstract

We study Bragg scattering of laser light by trapped Fermi atoms having two hyperfine spin components in the unitarity-limited strongly interacting regime at zero temperature. We calculate the dynamic structure function of the superfluid trapped Fermi gas in the unitarity limit. Model calculation using local density approximation shows that, the superfluid pairing gap in the unitarity limit is detectable from the measurements of dynamic structure function by Bragg spectroscopy, while in the weak-coupling BCS limit, the gap eludes such spectroscopic detection.