Density Profiles of Strongly Interacting Trapped Fermi Gases

Abstract

We study density profiles in trapped fermionic gases, near Feshbach resonances, at all $T \leq T_c$ and in the near-BEC and unitary regimes. For the latter, we quantify and characterize the generally neglected contribution from noncondensed Cooper pairs. As a consequence of these pairs, our profiles are rather well fit to a Thomas-Fermi (TF) functional form, and equally well fit to experimental data. Our work lends support to the notion that TF fits can be used in an experimental context to obtain information about the temperature.