Trapped fermions across a Feshbach resonance with population imbalance

Abstract

We investigate the phase separation of resonantly interacting fermions in a trap with imbalanced spin populations, both at zero and at finite temperatures. We directly minimize the thermodynamical potential under the local density approximation instead of using the gap equation, as the latter may give unstable solutions. On the BEC side of the resonance, one may cross three different phases from the trap center to the edge; while on the BCS side or at resonance, typically only two phases show up. We compare our results with the recent experiment, and the agreement is remarkable.