BCS-BEC crossover in an ultracold Fermi gas

This thesis summarizes our study on the properties of ultracold Fermions near a Feshbach resonance. The Feshbach resonance allows for a continuous tuning of the interaction strength between the atoms. With this tunability, many properties predicted for the BCS-BEC crossover region in solids can be shown to exist in this ultracold Fermi gas. With the highly controllable parameters and the clean environment in the experiments, the study of the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) to Bose-Einstein Condensation (BEC) crossover in ultracold Fermions provides valuable insights to the strongly interacting crossover region, which has never been achieved before in solids.; We first examine the properties of 6Li and 40K gases. We find that in the unitary region the properties of the system do not depend on the atom species: outside the unitary region, the properties of the system do depend on the scattering properties of the different atom species.; We study the dynamics of the ultracold Fermions in the crossover region in response to the variations in the external magnetic field. We find that the response depends on the time scale and the amplitude of the variations; which is in qualitative agreement with the experimental observations.; We derive a set of dynamic mean-field equations for a Fermi gas in an arbitrary potential trap near a wide Feshbach resonance. The equations are more general than the local density approximation (LDA), and less demanding computationally as the Bogoliubov-de-Gennes (BdG) equation. We then analyze the solubility of the equations, as well as solve a simplified version of the equations for illustration and for self-consistency check on the assumptions made during the derivation.; We systematically study the possible phases for a trapped Fermi gas with population imbalance near a Feshbach resonance. Our results agree qualitatively well with the recent experimental results, and predict the existence of two exotic non-BCS superfluid phases for the strongly interacting gas with population unbalance: the Breached Pair (BP) phase and the Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) phase. Finally, to guide the experimental efforts in the search of new quantum phases, we propose a detection scheme for the possible exotic phases.