Phase separation of trapped spin-imbalanced Fermi gases in one-dimensional optical lattices

Abstract

We calculate the density profiles of a trapped spin-imbalanced Fermi gas with attractive interactions in a one-dimensional optical lattice, using both the local-density approximation (LDA) and density-matrix renormalization-group (DMRG) simulations. Based on the exact equation of state obtained by Bethe ansatz, the LDA predicts that the gas phase separates into shells with a partially polarized core and fully paired wings, the latter occurring below a critical spin polarization. This behavior is also seen in numerically exact DMRG calculations at sufficiently large particle numbers. We show that, unlike in the continuum case, the critical polarization is a nonmonotonic function of the interaction strength and vanishes in the limit of large interactions.