Condensed Matter and Biological Physics Seminars

The Luther-Emery liquid is a state of matter that is predicted to occur in one-dimensional systems of interacting fermions and is characterized by a gapless charge spectrum and a gapped spin spectrum. In this talk we discuss a realization of the Luther-Emery phase in a trapped cold-atom gas. We demonstrate how a two-component atomic Fermi gas with attractive interactions subject to parabolic trapping inside an optical lattice exhibits compound phases characterized by the coexistence of spin pairing and atomic-density waves. A smooth crossover occurs with increasing magnitude of the atom-atom attraction to a state in which tightly bound spin-singlet dimers occupy the center of the trap. The existence of atomic-density waves could be detected in the elastic contribution to the light-scattering diffraction pattern.