Feshbach-Resonant Interactions in 40K and 6Li Degenerate Fermi Gases

Abstract

We theoretically examine a system of Fermi degenerate atoms coupled to bosonic molecules by a Feshbach resonance, focusing on the superfluid transition to a molecular Bose-Einstein condensate dressed by Cooper pairs of atoms. This problem raises an interest because it is unclear at present whether bimodal density distributions observed recently in 40-K and 6-Li are due to a condensate of bosonic molecules or fermionic atom pairs. As opposed to 40-K, we find that any measurable fraction of above-threshold bosonic molecules are necessarily absent for the 6-Li system in question, which strongly implicates Cooper pairs as the culprit behind its bimodal distributions.

4 pages, 2 figures, 25+ references, previously known as cond-mat/0409164 (it happens), accepted to PRL