Unitary Fermi gas in a harmonic trap

Abstract

We present an ab initio calculation of small numbers of trapped, strongly interacting fermions using the Green's function Monte Carlo method. The ground-state energy, density profile, and pairing gap are calculated for particle numbers $N=2--22$ using the parameter-free ``unitary'' interaction. Trial wave functions are taken in the form of correlated pairs in a harmonic oscillator basis. We find that the lowest energies are obtained with a minimum explicit pair correlation beyond that needed to exploit the degeneracy of oscillator states. We find that the energies can be well fitted by the expression ${a}_{\mathit{TF}}{E}_{\mathit{TF}}+\ensuremath{\Delta}\phantom{\rule{0.2em}{0ex}}\mathrm{mod}(N,2)$ where ${E}_{\mathit{TF}}$ is the Thomas-Fermi energy of a noninteracting gas in the trap and $\ensuremath{\Delta}$ is the pairing gap. There is no evidence of a shell correction energy in the systematics, but the density distributions show pronounced shell effects. We find the value $\ensuremath{\Delta}=0.7\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.2\ensuremath{\omega}$ for the pairing gap. This is smaller than the value found for the uniform gas at a density corresponding to the central density of the trapped gas.