Thermal conductivity of an ultracold Fermi gas in the BCS-BEC crossover

Recent experiments on sound waves in a unitary Fermi gas reveal many transport properties about strongly interacting fermions. Sound propagates through the coupling of momentum and heat transport, and attenuates strongly with the presence of a phase transition. In this work, focusing on the temperature regimes near and below the superfluid critical temperature $$T_c$$ T c in the BCS-BEC crossover, we present a Kubo-based microscopic calculation of thermal conductivity $$\kappa$$ κ , which has not attracted much attention compared to the shear viscosity. Our approach primarily addresses the contributions of the fermionic quasiparticles to thermal transport and our results return to the kinetic descriptions at high temperatures. $$\kappa$$ κ drops upon crossing the pseudogap temperature $$T^*$$ T ∗ , and its temperature dependence changes below $$T_c$$ T c . The drops become more pronounced on the weakly coupled BCS side, where the Pauli blocking causes the upturn of $$\kappa$$ κ above $$T^*$$ T ∗ . Our calculations fit well with the sound measurement on the damping rate.

Magic-angle semimetals

Breakthroughs in two-dimensional van der Waals heterostructures have revealed that twisting creates a moiré pattern that quenches the kinetic energy of electrons, allowing for exotic many-body states. We show that cold atomic, trapped ion, and metamaterial systems can emulate the effects of a twist in many models from one to three dimensions. Further, we demonstrate at larger angles (and argue at smaller angles) that by considering incommensurate effects, the magic-angle effect becomes a single-particle quantum phase transition (including in a model for twisted bilayer graphene in the chiral limit). We call these models “magic-angle semimetals”. Each contains nodes in the band structure and an incommensurate modulation. At magic-angle criticality, we report a nonanalytic density of states, flat bands, multifractal wave functions that Anderson delocalize in momentum space, and an essentially divergent effective interaction scale. As a particular example, we discuss how to observe this effect in an ultracold Fermi gas.