Christian Schunck Abstract

Christian Schunck
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"Pairing and Superfluidity in Strongly Interacting Fermi Gases"

Pairing of fermions lies at the heart of superconductivity and superfluidity. The recent experimental realization of strongly interacting atomic Fermi gases has opened a new, controllable way to study novel forms of pairing and superfluidity. A controversial question has been the stability of superfluidity against an imbalance between the two resonantly interacting spin components. We present the phase diagram of a spin-polarized Fermi gas of 6Li atoms at uitarity, mapping out the superfluid phase versus termperature and density imbalance. We will also discuss experiments studying pairing correlations both in the normal and superfluid phases via radio frequency spectroscopy. Using a new superfluid spin mixture we demonstrate that pair dissociation spectra in the BEC-BCS crossover resemble asymmetric molecular dissociation spectra if the final state interactions are weak.