Weiran Li
Published: 2013
Total Pages: 154
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Abstract: This thesis discusses two important topics in ultracold atomic gases: strong interactions in quantum gases, and quantum Hall physics in neutral atoms. First we give a brief introduction on basic scattering models in atomic physics, and an approach to adjust the interactions between atoms. We also include a list of experimental probes in cold atom physics. After these introductions, in Chapter 3, we report a few interesting problems in strongly interacting quantum gases. We introduce the BCS-BEC crossover model and relevant many-body techniques at the beginning, and discuss the details of several specific systems. We find the Fermi gases across narrow Feshbach resonances are strongly interacting at low temperature even when the magnetic field is several widths away from the resonance. We also discuss an approach to describe the metastable repulsive branch of Bose and Fermi gases across the resonance, and find a stable region of repulsive Bose gas close to unitarity. Some studies in two dimensional Fermi gases with spin imbalance are also included, and they are closely related to a number of recent experiments. In Chapter 4, we discuss quantum Hall physics in the context of neutral atomic gases. After illustrating how the Berry phase experienced by neutral atoms is equivalent to the magnetic field in electrons, we introduce the newly developed synthetic gauge field scheme in which a gauge potential is coupled to the neutral atoms. We give a detail introduction to this Raman coupling scheme developed by NIST group, and derive the theoretical model of the system. Then we make some predictions on the evolution of quantum Hall states when an extra anisotropy is applied from the external trap. Finally, we propose some experiments to verify our predictions.