Drake, Tara

Date: Friday Nov 7, 2014
Time: 14:50
Place: ETH Zurich, Hönggerberg, HPF G 6
Host: Tilman Esslinger

Breakdown of Fermi liquid description in the normal phase of the BCS-BEC crossover

Tara Drake
JILA, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA

The nature of the normal phase of an ultracold Fermi gas in the BCS-BEC crossover regime is an interesting and controversial topic. While the many-body ground state remains a condensate of paired fermions, the normal state must evolve from a Fermi liquid to a Bose gas of molecules as interactions increase. How this occurs is still largely unknown. We explore this question with measurements of the distribution of single-particle energies and momenta in a nearly homogeneous gas above Tc. The data fit well to a two part function that includes a peak corresponding to quasiparticles and an “incoherent background" based on the dispersion of thermal molecules. We find that the quasiparticle spectral weight vanishes abruptly as the strength of interactions is modified, which signals the breakdown of a Fermi liquid description. Such a sharp feature is surprising in a crossover.