BCS – BEC crossover, collective excitations, and hydrodynamics of superfluid quantum liquids and gases

Abstract

A Fermi gas described within the Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer (BCS) theory can be converted into a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) of composite molecules (dimers) by adiabatically tuning the interaction. The sequence of states that emerge in the process of such a conversion is referred to as the BCS–BEC crossover. We here review the theoretical and experimental results obtained for the BCS–BEC crossover in three- and quasi-two-dimensional quantum gases in the limiting geometry of traps and on optical lattices. We discuss nontrivial phenomena in the hydrodynamics of superfluid quantum gases and fluids, including the collective excitation spectrum in the BCS–BEC crossover, the hydrodynamics of rotating Bose condensates containing a large number of quantized vortices, and the intriguing problem of the chiral anomaly in the hydrodynamics of superfluid Fermi systems with an anisotropic p-wave pairing. We also analyze spin-imbalanced quantum gases and the potential to realize the triplet p-wave pairing via the Kohn–Luttinger mechanism in those gases. Recent results on two-dimensional Fermi-gas preparation and the observation of fluctuation phenomena related to the Berezinskii–Kosterlitz–Thouless transition in those gases are also reviewed. We briefly discuss the recent experimental discovery of the BCS–BEC crossover and anomalous superconductivity in bilayer graphene and the role of graphene, other Dirac semimetals (for example, bismuth), and 2D optical lattices as potential reference systems that exhibit all of the effects reviewed here.