Mesoscopic Fermi gas in a harmonic trap

TL;DR

This paper investigates the thermodynamic behavior of small Fermi gases in harmonic traps, emphasizing shell effects and their impact on properties like chemical potential and specific heat, with implications for ultracold atom experiments.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of shell closure effects on thermodynamic properties of mesoscopic Fermi gases in harmonic traps, including isotropic and anisotropic cases.

Findings

Shell effects significantly influence chemical potential and specific heat.

Density distributions vary with particle number and temperature.

Experimental detection of shell effects is feasible.

Abstract

We study the thermodynamical properties of a mesoscopic Fermi gas in view of recent possibilities to trap ultracold atoms in a harmonic potential. We focus on the effects of shell closure for finite small atom numbers. The dependence of the chemical potential, the specific heat and the density distribution on particle number and temperature is obtained. Isotropic and anisotropic traps are compared. Possibilities of experimental observations are discussed.