Relaxation of Fermionic Excitations in a Strongly Attractive Fermi Gas in an Optical Lattice
Abstract
We theoretically study the relaxation of high energy single particle excitations into molecules in a system of attractive fermions in an optical lattice, both in the superfluid and the normal phase. In a system characterized by an interaction scale U and a tunneling rate t, we show that the relaxation rate scales as ~Ctexp[-αU^2/t^2 ln(U/t)] in the large U/t limit. We obtain explicit expressions for the temperature and density dependent exponent α, both in the low temperature superfluid phase and the high temperature phase with pairing but no coherence between the molecules. We find that the relaxation rate decreases both with temperature and deviation of the fermion density from half filling. We show that quasiparticle and phase degrees of freedom are effectively decoupled within experimental time scales allowing for observation of ordered states even at high total energy of the system.
Additional Information
© 2011 American Physical Society. Received 1 June 2011; published 27 September 2011. The authors acknowledge fruitful discussions with A. Georges and support from ARO-DARPA-OLE, ARO-MURI and JQI-NSF-PFC (R. S.), Lee A. DuBridge fellowship (D. P.), a grant from ARO with funding from DARPA-OLE (A. M. R.), CUA, AFOSR Quantum Simulation MURI, ARO MURI on Atomtronics, and NSF Grant No. DMR-0705472 (E. A. D.).Attached Files
Published - Sensarma2011p16070Phys_Rev_Lett.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 27377
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20111024-101048205
- ARO-DARPA-OLE
- ARO-MURI
- JQI-NSF-PFC
- Lee A. DuBridge fellowship
- Army Research Office (ARO)
- DARPA-OLE
- CUA
- AFOSR Quantum Simulation MURI
- ARO MURI on Atomtronics
- DMR-0705472
- NSF
- Created
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2011-10-24Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-09Created from EPrint's last_modified field