Ultracold Atomic Fermi Gases in the Strongly Interacting Regime

Professor Hui Hu

Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne

3:30 pm Friday, 17 April 2009, EN101 (Ground Floor, EN Building), Hawthorn.

Interactions make life diverse and interesting. Interacting quantum gases are underlying the fundamental features of our life at the 'quantum scale" of extremely small sizes and low temperatures. Most of the features can be understood using the weak coupling 'mean-field' theory. However, recent experimental achievements of Feshbach resonances in ultracold Fermi gases, such as the one realized in the Swinburne CAOUS centre, usher in a new era of strong interactions that can hardly be understood from the simple 'mean-field' picture.

In this talk, I will introduce the concept of the so-called 'BCS-BEC crossover' for strongly interacting ultracold Fermi gases and discuss our recent theoretical developments of strong-coupling theories. Specific attention will be given to intriguing phenomena that uniquely occur in the strongly interacting regime, such as the universal thermodynamic behaviour and the two-fluid hydrodynamic collective modes. The key theoretical difficulty will be addressed, along with some open questions.

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