Crossover between few and many fermions in a harmonic trap

Abstract

The properties of a balanced two-component Fermi gas in a one-dimensional harmonic trap are studied by means of the coupled cluster method. For few fermions we recover the results of exact diagonalization, yet with this method we are able to study much larger systems. We compute the energy, the chemical potential, the pairing gap, and the density profile of the trapped clouds, smoothly mapping the crossover between the few-body and many-body limits. The energy is found to converge surprisingly rapidly to the many-body result for every value of the interaction strength. Many more particles are instead needed to give rise to the non-analytic behavior of the pairing gap, and to smoothen the pronounced even-odd oscillations of the chemical potential induced by the shell structure of the trap.