Lianyi He, Xu-Guang Huang
It is generally believed that a dilute spin-1/2 Fermi gas with repulsive interactions can undergo a ferromagnetic phase transition to a spin-polarized state at a critical gas parameter $(k_{\rm F}a)_c$. Previous theoretical predictions of the ferromagnetic phase transition are based on the perturbation theory which treats the gas parameter as a small number. On the other hand, Belitz, Kirkpatrick, and Vojta (BKV) have argued that the phase transition in clean itinerant ferromagnets is generically of first order at low temperatures, due to the correlation effects that lead to a nonanalytic term in the free energy. The second-order perturbation theory predicts a first order phase transition at $(k_{\rm F}a)_c=1.054$, consistent with the BKV argument. However, since the critical gas parameter is expected to be of order O(1), perturbative predictions may be unreliable. In this paper we study the non-perturbative effects on the ferromagnetic phase transition by summing the particle-particle ladder diagrams to all orders in the gas parameter. We consider a universal repulsive Fermi gas where the effective range effects can be neglected, which can be realized in a two-component Fermi gas of $^6$Li atoms by using a nonadiabatic field switch to the upper branch of a Feshbach resonance with a positive s-wave scattering length. Our theory predicts a second order phase transition, which indicates that ferromagnetic transition in dilute Fermi gases is possibly a counter example of the BKV argument. The predicted critical gas parameter $(k_{\rm F}a)_c=0.858$ is in good agreement with recent Quantum Monte Carlo result $(k_{\rm F}a)_c=0.86$ for a nearly zero-range potential [S. Pilati, \emph{et al}., Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 105}, 030405 (2010)]. We also compare the spin susceptibility with the Quantum Monte Carlo result and find good agreement.
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http://arxiv.org/abs/1106.1345
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