Kibble-Zurek universality in a strongly interacting Fermi superfluid

Abstract

Near a continuous phase transition, systems with different microscopic origins display universal dynamics if their underlying symmetries are compatible. In a thermally quenched system, the Kibble-Zurek mechanism for the creation of topological defects unveils this universality through a characteristic power-law exponent, which captures the dependence of the defect density on the quench rate. Here, we report the observation of the Kibble-Zurek universality in a strongly interacting Fermi superfluid. As the system's microscopic description is tuned from bosonic to fermionic, the quench formation of vortices reveals a constant scaling exponent arising from the $U(1)$ gauge symmetry of the system. For rapid quenches, destructive vortex collisions lead to the saturation of their densities, whose values can be universally scaled by the interaction-dependent area of the vortex cores.