The imbalanced Fermi gas at unitarity

Abstract

Lattice field theory is a useful tool for studying strongly interacting theories in condensed matter physics. A prominent example is the unitary Fermi gas: a two-component system of fermions interacting with divergent scattering length. With Monte Carlo methods this system can be studied from first principles. In the presence of an imbalance (unequal number of particles in the two components) a sign problem arises, which makes conventional algorithms inapplicable. We will show how to apply reweighting techniques to generalise the recently developed worm algorithm to the imbalanced case, and present results for the critical temperature, the energy per particle, the chemical potential and the contact density for equal, as well as unequal number of fermions in the two spin components.

7 pages, 5 figures, talk given at the XXVIII International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (Lattice 2010), June 14-19, 2010, Villasimius, Sardinia, Italy