Many-body dynamics of p-wave Feshbach-molecule production: A mean-field approach

Abstract

We study the mean-field dynamics of p-wave Feshbach-molecule production in an ultracold gas of Fermi atoms in the same internal state. We derive a separable potential to describe the low-energy scattering properties of such atoms, and use this potential to solve the mean-field dynamics during a magnetic-field sweep. Initially, on the negative scattering length side of a Feshbach resonance the gas is described by the BCS theory. We adapt the method by Szymańska to p-wave interacting Fermi gases and model the conversion dynamics of the gas into a Bose-Einstein condensate of molecules on the other side of the resonance under the influence of a linearly varying magnetic field. We have analyzed the dependence of the molecule production efficiency on the density of the gas, temperature, initial value of the magnetic field, and magnetic-field ramp speed. Our results show that in this approximation molecule production by a linear magnetic-field sweep is highly dependent on the initial state. © 2013 American Physical Society.