Dynamics of trapped fermion clouds

Experiments at JILA on the collisions between two oscillating spin-polarized components of a Fermi gas of 40K atoms have shown that this setup is an important tool for studying the dynamics of quantum gases. We have developed advanced numerical methods to solve the Vlasov–Landau equations for a binary mixture of atomic Fermi gases inside a harmonic trap at very low temperatures. In particular, a locally adaptive importance-sampling technique allows us to handle collisional interactions several orders of magnitude more efficiently than in standard Monte Carlo calculations. These methods have been applied to study the dynamical and transport properties of a fermion mixture in the presence of mean-field interactions and of collisions between its components for system parameters ranging from the collisionless to the hydrodynamic regime