Density Profiles of Strongly Interacting Trapped Fermi Gases

TL;DR

This paper investigates the density profiles of strongly interacting trapped Fermi gases near Feshbach resonances across all temperatures below the critical temperature, emphasizing the role of noncondensed Cooper pairs and validating Thomas-Fermi fits for experimental analysis.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of density profiles including noncondensed pairs and demonstrates the effectiveness of Thomas-Fermi fits in experimental temperature estimation.

Findings

Profiles are well described by Thomas-Fermi functional form.

Noncondensed Cooper pairs significantly influence density profiles.

Thomas-Fermi fits can reliably infer temperature from experimental data.

Abstract

We study density profiles in trapped fermionic gases, near Feshbach resonances, at all $T \leq T_c$ and in the near-BEC and unitary regimes. For the latter, we quantify and characterize the generally neglected contribution from noncondensed Cooper pairs. As a consequence of these pairs, our profiles are rather well fit to a Thomas-Fermi (TF) functional form, and equally well fit to experimental data. Our work lends support to the notion that TF fits can be used in an experimental context to obtain information about the temperature.