Phases of a bilayer Fermi gas

We investigate a two-species Fermi gas in which one species is confined in two parallel layers and interacts with the other species in the three-dimensional space by a tunable short-range interaction. Based on the controlled weak coupling analysis and the exact three-body calculation, we show that the system has a rich phase diagram in the plane of the effective scattering length and the layer separation. Resulting phases include an interlayer s-wave pairing, an intralayer p-wave pairing, a dimer Bose-Einstein condensation, and a Fermi gas of stable Efimov-like trimers. Our system provides a widely applicable scheme to induce long-range interlayer correlations in ultracold atoms.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures; (v2) stability of trimer is emphasized; (v3) published versio

Realisation of chiral symmetry in the domain model of QCD

The domain model for the QCD vacuum has previously been developed and shown to exhibit confinement of quarks and strong correlation of the local chirality of quark modes and duality of the background domain-like gluon field. Quark fluctuations satisfy a chirality violating boundary conditions parametrized by a random chiral angle $\alpha_j$ on the $j-th$ domain. The free energy of an ensemble of $N\to\infty$ domains depends on $\{\alpha_j, j=1... N\}$ through the logarithm of the quark determinant. Its parity odd part is given by the axial anomaly. The anomaly contribution to the free energy suppresses continuous axial U(1) degeneracy in the ground state, leaving only a residual axial Z(2) symmetry. This discrete symmetry and flavour $SU(N_f)_L\times SU(N_f)_R$ chiral symmetry in turn are spontaneously broken with a quark condensate arising due to the asymmetry of the spectrum of Dirac operator. In order to illustrate the splitting between the $\eta'$ from octet pseudoscalar mesons realised in the domain model, we estimate the masses of light pseudoscalar and vector mesons.Comment: 27 pages, uses RevTeX, 3 figures. v.2. includes additional references and comment

CP-violating theta parameter in the domain model of the QCD vacuum

A non-zero CP-violating $\theta$ parameter is treated in the domain model which assumes a cluster-like vacuum structure whose units are characterised in particular by a topological charge which is not necessarily an integer number. In the present paper we restrict consideration to rational values of the charge. The model has previously been shown to manifest confinement, spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking and the absence of an axial U(1) Goldstone boson. We find that the specific structure of the minima of the free energy density of the domain ensemble forces a $2\pi$-periodicity of observables in $\theta$ for any number of light quarks, that vacuum doubling occurs at $\theta=\pi$ for any $N_f>1$ and any value of topological charge $q$. These features are in agreement with expectations based on anomalous Ward identities and large $N_c$ effective theories. We find also additional values of $\theta$ depending on $q$ for which vacuum doubling occurs.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures. Final version with modification of Eq.(2), additional references, minor typographical correction

Plasma assisted fabrication of zinc oxide based nanostructures

ZnO/Ag nanocomposite structures were prepared by using a discharge with an atmospheric-pressure mi-croplasma cathode and a solid metal anode immersed in an electrolyte solution and their properties were studied. The effect of Ag on the microstructure and optical properties of ZnO has been discussed