Sound wave propagation in strongly elongated fermion clouds at finite collisionality

Abstract

We evaluate the transition from zero-sound to first-sound behaviour with increasing collisionality in the propagation of density waves through an ultracold gaseous mixture of fermionic atoms confined in the normal state inside a cigar-shaped harmonic trap. We study for this purpose the evolution of the one-body distribution functions associated with a density perturbation generated in the central region of the cloud, as obtained by solving numerically the Vlasov-Landau equations. We examine a variety of trap anisotropies and of repulsive or attractive interaction strengths between the components of the mixture, and the speed of propagation of the density disturbance is found to decrease in both cases as the magnitude of the coupling strength is increased. The results are compared with the values of the speed of zero sound and of first sound, as obtained analytically from the limit of vanishing collisionality and from linearized hydrodynamics. The main effects of the quasi-one-dimensional confinement are the stabilization of zero-sound excitations in the attractive regime before collapse and the lowering of the hydrodynamic sound velocity by a factor \sqrt{3/5} relative to three-dimensional behaviour.