Universal Sound Absorption in Amorphous Solids: A Theory of Elastically Coupled Generic Blocks

Glasses are known to exhibit quantitative universalities at low temperatures, the most striking of which is the ultrasonic attenuation coefficient 1/Q. In this work we develop a theory of coupled generic blocks with a certain randomness property to show that universality emerges essentially due to the interactions between elastic blocks, regardless of their microscopic nature.Comment: (Revised) 16 pages, 2 figures. To appear in Journal of Non-Crystalline Solid

Universal Properties of the Ultra-Cold Fermi Gas

We present some general considerations on the properties of a two-component ultra-cold Fermi gas along the BEC-BCS crossover. It is shown that the interaction energy and the ground state energy can be written in terms of a single dimensionless function $h({\xi,\tau})$, where $\xi=-(k_Fa_s)^{-1}$ and $\tau=T/T_F$. The function $h(\xi,\tau)$ incorporates all the many-body physics and naturally occurs in other physical quantities as well. In particular, we show that the RF-spectroscopy shift \bar{\d\o}(\xi,\tau) and the molecular fraction $f_c(\xi,\tau)$ in the closed channel can be expressed in terms of $h(\xi,\tau)$ and thus have identical temperature dependence. The conclusions should have testable consequences in future experiments

BEC-BCS Crossover with Feshbach Resonance for a Three-Hyperfine-Species Model

We consider the behavior of an ultracold Fermi gas across a narrow Feshbach resonance, where the occupation of the closed channel may not be negligible. While the corrections to the single-channel formulae associated with the nonzero chemical potential and with particle conservation have been considered in the existing literature, there is a further effect, namely the "inter-channel Pauli exclusion principle" associated with the fact that a single hyperfine species may be common to the two channels. We focus on this effect and show that, as intuitively expected, the resulting corrections are of order $E_F/\eta$, where $E_F$ is the Fermi energy of the gas in the absence of interactions and $\eta$ is the Zeeman energy difference between the two channels. We also consider the related corrections to the fermionic excitation spectrum, and briefly discuss the collective modes of the system