Surface Tension in Unitary Fermi Gases with Population Imbalance

TL;DR

This paper investigates how surface tension influences the shape of imbalanced Fermi gases at unitarity, clarifying experimental and theoretical discrepancies by accounting for surface effects.

Contribution

It introduces the role of surface tension in explaining shape distortions in trapped Fermi gases with population imbalance, improving agreement between theory and experiments.

Findings

Surface tension causes significant shape distortions in large aspect ratio clouds.

Including surface tension effects resolves discrepancies between experimental results and theoretical models.

The study enhances understanding of phase boundaries in imbalanced Fermi gases.

Abstract

We study the effects of surface tension between normal and superfluid regions of a trapped Fermi gas at unitarity. We find that surface tension causes notable distortions in the shape of large aspect ratio clouds. Including these distortions in our theories resolves many of the apparent discrepancies among different experiments and between theory and experiments.