title: Achieving a BCS transition in an atomic Fermi gas.
abstract: We consider a gas of cold fermionic atoms having two spin components with interactions characterized by their s-wave scattering length a. At positive scattering length the atoms form weakly bound bosonic molecules which can be evaporatively cooled to undergo Bose-Einstein condensation, whereas at negative scattering length BCS pairing can take place. It is shown that, by adiabatically tuning the scattering length a from positive to negative values, one may transform the molecular Bose-Einstein condensate into a highly degenerate atomic Fermi gas, with the ratio of temperature to Fermi temperature T/T(F) approximately 10(-2). The corresponding critical final value of k(F)/a/, which leads to the BCS transition, is found to be about one-half, where k(F) is the Fermi momentum.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire Kastler Brossel, Ecole Normale Supérieure, 24 rue Lhomond, 75231 Paris, France.
authors.forename: L D
authors.initials: LD
authors.lastname: Carr
authors.forename: G V
authors.initials: GV
authors.lastname: Shlyapnikov
authors.forename: Y
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Castin