Low-momentum interactions for ultracold Fermi gases

Abstract

We consider a two-component Fermi gas with a contact interaction from the BCS regime to the unitary limit. Starting from the idea that many-body effects should not depend on short-distance or high-momentum physics which is encoded in the s-wave scattering length, but only on momentum scales of the order of the Fermi momentum, we build effective low-momentum interactions that reproduce the scattering phase shifts of the contact interaction below some momentum cutoff. Inspired from recent successes of this method in nuclear structure theory, we use these interactions to describe the equation of state of the Fermi gas in the framework of Hartree-Fock-Bogliubov theory with perturbative corrections. In the BCS regime, there is a range of cutoffs where we obtain fully converged results. Near unitarity, convergence is not yet reached, but we obtain promising results for the ground-state energies close to the experimental ones. Limitations and possible extensions of the approach are discussed.