Dear Friends, On Thursday, November 1, there will be an ITAMP topical lunch discussion. Tea Room (P-226) @ CfA (60 Garden Street) Time: 12:00-1:30 As always pizza will be served. Speaker: Prof. Dörte Blume Title: S-wave interacting fermions under anisotropic harmonic confinement: Dimensional crossover of energetics and virial coefficients Abstract: Few-body physics has played a prominent role in atomic, molecular, chemical and nuclear physics since the early days of quantum mechanics. It is now possible -- thanks to tremendous progress in cooling, trapping, and manipulating ultracold samples -- to experimentally study few-body phenomena in trapped atomic and molecular systems with unprecedented control. This talk summarizes recent studies of few-body phenomena in trapped fermionic gases. We present accurate solutions of the Schrodinger equation for three equal-mass fermions in two different spin states with zero-range s-wave interactions and discuss the transition from quasi-one-dimensional to strictly one-dimensional and quasi-two-dimensional to strictly two-dimensional geometries. We determine and interpret the eigenenergies of the system as a function of the trap geometry and the strength of the s-wave interactions. The eigenenergies are used to investigate the dependence of the second- and third-order virial coefficients, which play an important role in the virial expansion of the thermodynamic potential, on the geometry of the trap. We show that the second- and third-order virial coefficients for anisotropic confinement geometries are, for experimentally relevant temperatures, very well approximated by those for the spherically symmetric confinement for all s-wave scattering lengths. [1] S.E. Gharashi, K.M. Daily, and D. Blume, Phys. Rev. A 86, 042702 (2012) Looking forward to seeing you there, Misha Lemeshko -- Dr. Mikhail Lemeshko Institute for Theoretical Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics (ITAMP) Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics MS-14 60 Garden St. Cambridge, MA 02138 U.S.A. mlemeshko(a)cfa.harvard.edu http://sites.google.com/site/mishalemeshko/ Tel. +1 (617) 496-7610 Fax +1 (617) 496-7668