Phase diagram of trapped degenerate Fermi gases including effective s- and p-wave interactions

Abstract

The influence of s- and p-wave interactions on trapped degenerate one and two-component Fermi gases is investigated. The energy functional of a multicomponent Fermi gas is derived within the Thomas-Fermi approximation including the s- and p-wave terms of an effective contact interaction. On this basis the stability of the dilute gas against mean-field induced collapse due to attractive interactions is investigated and explicit stability conditions in terms of Fermi momentum and s- and p-wave scattering lengths are derived. Furthermore the spatial separation in a two-component Fermi gas is discussed, explicit conditions for the onset of component demixing are given, and the density distributions in the separated phase are calculated. The findings are summarized in a zero-temperature phase diagram for the degenerate two-component Fermi gas. It is shown that the p-wave interaction has significant influence on the phase diagram of the degenerate Fermi gas and causes new phenomena like absolute stabilization against collapse and component separation. It may therefore be useful in the context of the envisioned BCS transition in trapped atomic Fermi gases.