Thermodynamics of balanced and slightly spin-imbalanced Fermi gases at unitarity

Abstract: In this paper we present a Monte Carlo calculation of the critical temperature and other thermodynamic quantities for the unitary Fermi gas with a population imbalance (unequal number of fermions in the two spin components). We describe an improved worm type algorithm that is less prone to autocorrelations than the previously available methods and show how this algorithm can be applied to simulate the unitary Fermi gas in presence of a small imbalance. Our data indicates that the critical temperature remains almost constant for small imbalances $h=\Delta\mu/\epsilon_F\lessapprox0.2$. We obtain the continuum result $T_c=0.171(5)\epsilon_F$ in units of Fermi energy and derive a lower bound on the deviation of the critical temperature from the balanced limit, $T_c(h)-T_c(0)>-0.5\epsilon_Fh^2$. Using an additional assumption a tighter lower bound can be obtained. We also calculate the energy per particle and the chemical potential in the balanced and imbalanced cases.