Ferromagnetism in the upper branch of the Feshbach resonance and the hard-sphere Fermi gas

Abstract

We address the question of ferromagnetism in repulsive Fermi gas, a problem of fundamental interest, using quantum Monte Carlo simulations that include backflow corrections. We investigate a two-component Fermi gas on the upper branch of a Feshbach resonance and contrast it with the hard-sphere gas. We find that, in both cases, the Fermi liquid becomes unstable to ferromagnetism at a kFa smaller than the mean field result, where kF is the Fermi wavevector and a is the scattering length. Even though the total energies E(kFa) are similar in the two cases, their pair correlations and kinetic energies are completely different, reflecting the underlying potentials. We discuss the extent to which our calculations shed light on recent experiments.