Expansion of an interacting Fermi gas

  • 8 August 2002
Abstract
We study the expansion of an ultracold sample of fermions initially trapped in a anisotropic harmonic trap. We show that the expansion of the cloud provides valuable information about the state of the system and the role of interactions. In particular the time evolution of the deformation of the expanding cloud behaves quite differently depending on whether the system is in the normal or in the superfluid phase. For the superfluid phase, we predict an inversion of the deformation of the sample, similarly to what happens with Bose-Einstein condensates. Viceversa, in the normal phase, the inversion of the aspect ratio is never achieved, if the mean field interaction is attractive.

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