Pairing in a system of a few attractive fermions in a harmonic trap

We study a strongly attractive system of a few spin-1/2 fermions confined in a one-dimensional harmonic trap, interacting via two-body contact potential. Performing exact diagonalization of the Hamiltonian we analyze the ground state and the thermal state of the system in terms of one-- and two--particle reduced density matrices. We show how for strong attraction the correlated pairs emerge in the system. We find that the fraction of correlated pairs depends on temperature and we show that this dependence has universal properties analogous to the gap function known from the theory of superconductivity. In contrast to the standard approach based on the variational ansatz and/or perturbation theory, our predictions are exact and are valid also in a strong attraction limit. Our findings contribute to the understanding of strongly correlated few-body systems and can be verified in current experiments on ultra-cold atoms.Comment: 6 figure

Exact dynamics and decoherence of two cold bosons in a 1D harmonic trap

We study dynamics of two interacting ultra cold Bose atoms in a harmonic oscillator potential in one spatial dimension. Making use of the exact solution of the eigenvalue problem of a particle in the delta-like potential we study time evolution of initially separable state of two particles. The corresponding time dependent single particle density matrix is obtained and diagonalized and single particle orbitals are found. This allows to study decoherence as well as creation of entanglement during the dynamics. The evolution of the orbital corresponding to the largest eigenvalue is then compared to the evolution according to the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. We show that if initially the center of mass and relative degrees of freedom are entangled then the Gross-Pitaevskii equation fails to reproduce the exact dynamics and entanglement is produced dynamically. We stress that predictions of our study can be verified experimentally in an optical lattice in the low-tunneling limit.Comment: 9 figures, 5 movies available on-lin

Ground state of two-component degenerate fermionic gases

We analyze the ground state of the two--component gas of trapped ultracold fermionic atoms. We neglect the forces between atoms in the same hyperfine state (the same component). For the case when the forces between distinguishable atoms (i.e., atoms in different hyperfine states) are repulsive (positive mutual scattering length), we find the existence of critical interaction strength above which one atomic fraction expels the other from the center of the trap. When atoms from different components attract each other (negative mutual scattering length) the ground state of the system dramatically changes its structure for strong enough attraction -- the Cooper pairs built of atoms in different hyperfine states appear.Comment: 10 pages, 14 figure