Hydrodynamic excitations in a spin-polarized Fermi gas under harmonic confinement in one dimension

Abstract

We consider a time-dependent nonlinear Schrödinger equation in one dimension (1D) with a fifth-order interaction term and external harmonic confinement, as a model for both (i) a Bose gas with hard-core contact interactions in the local-density approximation, and (ii) a spin-polarized Fermi gas in the collisional regime. We evaluate analytically in the Thomas-Fermi limit the density fluctuation profiles and the collective excitation frequencies, and compare the results for the low-lying modes with those obtained from numerical solution of the Schrödinger equation. We find that the excitation frequencies are multiples of the harmonic-trap frequency even in the strong-coupling Thomas-Fermi regime. This result shows that the hydrodynamic and the collisionless collective spectra coincide in the harmonically confined 1D Fermi gas, as they do for sound waves in its homogeneous analog. It also shows that in this case the local-density theory reproduces the exact collective spectrum of the hard-core Bose gas under harmonic confinement. © 2001 The American Physical Society.