Counterflow in a doubly superfluid mixture of Bosons and Fermions

In this article, we calculate the friction between two counter-flowing bosonic and fermionic super-fluids. In the limit where the boson-boson and boson-fermion interactions can be treated within the mean-field approximation, we show that the force can be related to the dynamical structure factor of the fermionic component. Finally, we provide asymptotic expressions for weakly and strongly attractive fermions and show that the damping rate obeys simple scaling laws close to the critical velocity.Comment: Submitted to Phys. Rev.

Universal phase diagram of a strongly interacting Fermi gas with unbalanced spin populations

We present a theoretical interpretation of a recent experiment presented in ref. \cite{Zwierlein06} on the density profile of Fermi gases with unbalanced spin populations. We show that in the regime of strong interaction, the boundaries of the three phases observed in \cite{Zwierlein06} can be characterized by two dimensionless numbers $\eta\_\alpha$ and $\eta\_\beta$. Using a combination of a variational treatment and a study of the experimental results, we infer rather precise bounds for these two parameters.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

The normal phase of an imbalanced Fermi gas

Recent experiments on imbalanced Fermi gases have raised interest in the physics of an impurity immersed in a Fermi sea, the so-called Fermi polaron. In this letter, a simple theory is devised to describe dilute Fermi-polaron ensembles corresponding to the normal phase of an imbalanced Fermi gas. An exact formula is obtained for the dominant interaction between polarons, expressed solely in terms of a single polaron parameter. The physics of this interaction is identified as a signature of the Pauli exclusion principle.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, published in PR

Capillary-gravity waves: a "fixed-depth" analysis

We study the onset of the wave-resistance due to the generation of capillary-gravity waves by a partially immersed moving object in the case where the object is hold at a fixed immersion depth. We show that, in this case, the wave resistance varies continuously with the velocity, in qualitative accordance with recent experiments by Burghelea et al. (Phys. Rev. Lett. 86, 2557 (2001)).Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, submitted to Europhysics Letter

Few vs many-body physics of an impurity immersed in a superfluid of spin 1/2 attractive fermions

In this article we investigate the properties of an impurity immersed in a superfluid of strongly correlated spin 1/2 fermions. For resonant interactions, we first relate the stability diagram of dimer and trimer states to the three-body problem for an impurity interacting with a pair of fermions. Then we calculate the beyond-mean-field corrections to the energy of a weakly interacting impurity. We show that these corrections are divergent and have to be regularized by properly accounting for three-body physics in the problem

Momentum distribution of a dilute unitary Bose gas with three-body losses

Using Boltzmann's equation, we study the effect of three-body losses on the momentum distribution of a homogeneous unitary Bose gas in the dilute limit where quantum correlations are negligible. We calculate the momentum distribution of the gas and show that inelastic collisions are quantitatively as important as a second order virial correction.Comment: 4 pages + supplemental materia

Hydrodynamic spectrum of a superfluid in an elongated trap

--In this article we study the hydrodynamic spectrum of a superfluid confined in a cylindrical trap. We show that the dispersion relation $\omega$(q) of the phonon branch scales like \sqrt q at large q, leading to a vanishingly small superfluid critical velocity. In practice the critical velocity is set by the breakdown of the hydrodynamic approximation. For a broad class of superfluids, this entails a reduction of the critical velocity by a factor ($\omega$ $\perp$ /\"i1/2c) 1/3 with respect to the free-space prediction (here $\omega$ $\perp$ is the trapping frequency and \"i1/2c the chemical potential of the cloud)