Feshbach-resonant interactions in 40K and 6Li degenerate Fermi gases

Abstract

We theoretically examine a system of Fermi degenerate atoms coupled to bosonic molecules by a Feshbach resonance, focusing on the superfluid transition to a molecular Bose-Einstein condensate dressed by Cooper pairs of atoms. This problem raises interest because it is unclear at present whether bimodal density distributions observed recently in 40K and 6Li are due to a condensate of bosonic molecules or fermionic atom pairs. As opposed to 40K, we find that any measurable fraction of above-threshold bosonic molecules is necessarily absent for the 6Li system in question, which strongly implicates Cooper pairs as the culprit behind its bimodal distributions.