Tunable high-temperature thermodynamics of weakly interacting dipolar gases

Abstract

We consider dilute gases of dipolar bosons or fermions in the high-temperature limit in a spherically symmetric harmonic trapping potential. We examine the system using a virial expansion up to second order in the fugacity. Using the Born approximation and assuming purely dipolar interactions, we find that the second-order virial coefficient for both bosons and fermions depends quadratically on the dipole length and is negative at high temperatures, indicating that to lowest order in the dipole-dipole interactions the dipolar single-component quantum gases are repulsive. If the $s$-wave scattering length for the bosonic system is tunable and its absolute value is made small, then the $s$-wave interactions dominate and the dipolar gas behaves like a weakly interacting Bose gas with isotropic $s$-wave interactions. If the generalized scattering lengths for the fermionic system are tunable, then the dipole length can enter linearly in the virial equation of state, enhancing the dipole-dipole effects in the thermodynamic observables.