Conventional character of the BCS-BEC cross-over in ultra-cold gases of 40K

TL;DR

This paper investigates the BCS-BEC cross-over in ultra-cold 40K gases, demonstrating that standard Hamiltonians and mean-field theory accurately describe the phenomenon without requiring molecular condensate occupation, aligning it with conventional solid-state physics.

Contribution

It shows that both fermionic and boson-fermion Hamiltonians yield similar results when properly including the highest excited bound state, clarifying the mechanism of the BCS-BEC cross-over in 40K gases.

Findings

No significant difference between fermionic and boson-fermion approaches when including the excited bound state

Macroscopic molecular occupation is not responsible for fermionic pair condensation

The BCS-BEC cross-over can be understood using conventional solid-state physics frameworks

Abstract

We use the standard fermionic and boson-fermion Hamiltonians to study the BCS-BEC cross-over near the 202 G resonance in a two-component mixture of fermionic 40K atoms employed in the experiment of C.A. Regal et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 040403 (2004). Our mean-field analysis of many-body equilibrium quantities shows virtually no differences between the predictions of the two approaches, provided they are both implemented in a manner that properly includes the effect of the highest excited bound state of the background scattering potential, rather than just the magnetic-field dependence of the scattering length. Consequently, we rule out the macroscopic occupation of the molecular field as a mechanism behind the fermionic pair condensation and show that the BCS-BEC cross-over in ultra-cold 40K gases can be analysed and understood on the same basis as in the conventional systems of solid state physics.