Universality in Phase Transitions for Ultracold Fermionic Atoms

Abstract

We describe the gas of ultracold fermionic atoms by a functional integral for atom and molecule fields. The crossover from Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) to BCS-type superfluidity shows universal features in terms of a concentration parameter for the ratio between scattering length and average interatomic distance. We discuss the relevance of the Yukawa coupling between atoms and molecules, establish an exact narrow resonance limit and show that renormalized quantities are independent of the Yukawa coupling for the broad resonance, BCS and BEC limits. Within our functional integral formalism we compute the atom scattering in vacuum and the molecular binding energy. This connects the universal concentration parameter to the magnetic field of a given experiment. Beyond mean field theory we include the fluctuations of the molecule field and the renormalization effects for the atom-molecule coupling. We find excellent agreement with the observed fraction of bare molecules in fermionic lithium and qualitative agreement with the condensate fraction in fermionic lithium and potassium. In addition to the phase diagram and condensate fraction we compute the correlation length for molecules, the in-medium scattering length for molecules and atoms and the sound velocity.