Understanding the superfluid phase diagram in trapped Fermi gases

Trapped ultracold Fermi gases provide a system that can be tuned between the BCS and Bose-Einstein condensation regimes by means of a magnetic-field Feshbach resonance. Condensation of fermionic atom pairs in a ⁴⁰K gas was demonstrated experimentally by a sweep technique that pairwise projects fermionic atoms onto molecules. In this paper, we examine previous data obtained with this technique that probed the phase boundary in the temperature-magnetic field plane. Comparison of the ⁴⁰K data to a theoretically computed phase diagram demonstrates good agreement between the two.