Postadiabatic Hamiltonian for low-energy excitations in a slowly-time-dependent BCS-BEC crossover

Abstract

We develop a Hamiltonian that describes the time-dependent formation of a molecular Bose-Einstein condensate from a Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer state of fermionic atoms as a result of slowly sweeping through a Feshbach resonance. In contrast to many other calculations in the field, our Hamiltonian includes the leading postadiabatic effects that arise because the crossover proceeds at a nonzero sweep rate. We apply a path-integral approach and a stationary phase approximation for the molecular $\mathbf{k}=\mathbf{0}$ background, which is a good approximation for narrow resonances [see, e.g., Diehl and Wetterich, Phys. Rev. A 73, 033615 (2006) as well as Diehl, Gies, Pawlowski, and Wetterich, Phys. Rev. A 76, 053627 (2007)]. We use two-body adiabatic approximations to solve the atomic evolution within this background. The dynamics of the $\mathbf{k}\ensuremath{\ne}\mathbf{0}$ molecular modes is solved within a dilute gas approximation and by mapping it onto a purely bosonic Hamiltonian. Our main result is a postadiabatic effective Hamiltonian in terms of the instantaneous bosonic (Anderson-)Bogoliubov modes, which holds throughout the whole resonance, as long as the Feshbach sweep is slow enough to avoid breaking Cooper pairs.