Speaker: Jacques Tempere,  Department of Physics, University of Antwerp, Belgium

Titel: Dynamics and interactions between vortices in Fermionic superfluids

Abstract: Atomic Fermi gases form a versatile system in which to study Cooper pairing and superfluidity in regimes that can not be reached in liquid helium or in solids. Following the first realization of fermionic superfluidity in an ultracold gas in 2003, experimenters started to exploit the many handles and controls they have over quantum gases. The superfluid nature of the paired state was demonstrated strikingly by the observation of a lattice of singly-quantized vortices. Vortices have also been used to study the effect of population imbalance on superfluidity. In this talk, I will focus on a quantum hydrodynamic description of vortices and solitons in ultracold Fermi gases, deriving it from a gradient expansion of the action functional for the fermionic fields. This allows to describe structure and dynamics of vortices and solitons in these systems across the BEC-BCS crossover, and in particular to study multivortex and multisoliton physics. As will be shown, the behavior of these objects can be tuned from ideal hydrodynamics to overdamped dynamics, which can be revealed by studying the interactions between the vortices and the solitons.

Coffee/tea and bread rolls from 10:00