Lab Home | Phone | Search
Center for Nonlinear Studies  Center for Nonlinear Studies
 Home 
 People 
 Current 
 Affiliates 
 Visitors 
 Students 
 Research 
 ICAM-LANL 
 Publications 
 Conferences 
 Workshops 
 Sponsorship 
 Talks 
 Colloquia 
 Colloquia Archive 
 Seminars 
 Postdoc Seminars Archive 
 Quantum Lunch 
 Quantum Lunch Archive 
 CMS Colloquia 
 Q-Mat Seminars 
 Q-Mat Seminars Archive 
 P/T Colloquia 
 Archive 
 Kac Lectures 
 Kac Fellows 
 Dist. Quant. Lecture 
 Ulam Scholar 
 Colloquia 
 
 Jobs 
 Postdocs 
 CNLS Fellowship Application 
 Students 
 Student Program 
 Visitors 
 Description 
 Past Visitors 
 Services 
 General 
 
 History of CNLS 
 
 Maps, Directions 
 CNLS Office 
 T-Division 
 LANL 
 
Monday, July 20, 2009
3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
CNLS Conference Room (TA-3, Bldg 1690)

Colloquium

The unitary Fermi gas: so simple and yet so complex!

Aurel Bulgac
University of Washington

Ten years ago George Bertsch challenged the many-body community to figure out the basic properties of a system of spin 1/2 fermions interacting with a zero range potential and an infinite scattering length. As George Bertsch has intimated, this system has no other dimensional parameters except the average separation between particles, and thus its energy is, up to an undetermined dimensionless constant, proportional to the energy of a non-interacting Fermi gas, if stable. However, these particles interact with each other with essentially an infinite scattering cross section and it was clear ten years ago that this system, which in many respects is similar to dilute neutron matter which exists in neutron stars, is a highly nontrivial one. Since then many of the properties of this system have been unravelled, both theoretically and experimentally. It was firmly established so far, among many other things, that this system is stable and superfluid, with the highest critical temperature (in appropriate units) known. What perhaps emerged as perhaps an even bigger surprise with time was the fact that this system, in spite of its apparent simplicity, is a host of many phase transitions and phenomena, which still challenge both theorists and experimentalists alike, and very likely a few more surprises are in store for us. In this talk I will present an overview of some of the theoretical efforts devoted to this system and I will refer to the available experimental results when appropriate.

Host: Eddy Timmermans