Detecting the breached pair phase in a polarized ultracold Fermi gas

Abstract

We propose a method for the experimental detection of a new quantum phase, the breached pair state, in a strongly interacting ultracold Fermi gas with population imbalance. We show that through the time-of-flight Raman imaging, the presence of such a phase can be unambiguously determined with a measurement of the momentum-space phase separation of the minority spin component. To guide the experimental efforts, the momentum-space density profiles are calculated under typical experimental conditions.