Short-time operator product expansion for rf spectroscopy of a strongly interacting Fermi gas

Phys Rev Lett. 2010 Jun 4;104(22):223004. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.104.223004. Epub 2010 Jun 4.

Abstract

Universal relations that hold for any state provide powerful constraints on systems consisting of fermions with two spin states interacting with a large scattering length. In radio-frequency (rf) spectroscopy, the mean shift in the rf frequency and the large-frequency tail of the rf transition rate are proportional to the contact, which measures the density of pairs with small separations. We show that these universal relations can be derived and extended by using the short-time operator product expansion of quantum field theory. This is a general method for identifying aspects of many-body physics that are controlled by few-body physics.