title: Exploring the thermodynamics of a universal Fermi gas.
abstract: One of the greatest challenges in modern physics is to understand the behaviour of an ensemble of strongly interacting particles. A class of quantum many-body systems (such as neutron star matter and cold Fermi gases) share the same universal thermodynamic properties when interactions reach the maximum effective value allowed by quantum mechanics, the so-called unitary limit. This makes it possible in principle to simulate some astrophysical phenomena inside the highly controlled environment of an atomic physics laboratory. Previous work on the thermodynamics of a two-component Fermi gas led to thermodynamic quantities averaged over the trap, making comparisons with many-body theories developed for uniform gases difficult. Here we develop a general experimental method that yields the equation of state of a uniform gas, as well as enabling a detailed comparison with existing theories. The precision of our equation of state leads to new physical insights into the unitary gas. For the unpolarized gas, we show that the low-temperature thermodynamics of the strongly interacting normal phase is well described by Fermi liquid theory, and we localize the superfluid transition. For a spin-polarized system, our equation of state at zero temperature has a 2 per cent accuracy and extends work on the phase diagram to a new regime of precision. We show in particular that, despite strong interactions, the normal phase behaves as a mixture of two ideal gases: a Fermi gas of bare majority atoms and a non-interacting gas of dressed quasi-particles, the fermionic polarons.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire Kastler Brossel, CNRS, UPMC, Ecole Normale Supérieure, 24 rue Lhomond, 75231 Paris, France. sylvain.nascimbene@ens.fr
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Nascimbène
authors.forename: N
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Navon
authors.forename: K J
authors.initials: KJ
authors.lastname: Jiang
authors.forename: F
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Chevy
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Salomon