High-temperature thermodynamics of a strongly correlated Fermi gas

We briefly review current research progress in the field of strongly correlated atomic Fermi gases. A deep understanding of strongly correlated quantum gases is plagued by the lack of either exact solutions or a controllable small interaction parameter. In this work, we present a systematic virial expansion method to study the high-temperature thermodynamics of a strongly correlated Fermi gas, where the controllable parameter is given by the fugacity, exp(μ/kBT), with μ being the chemical potential. A practical way is proposed to obtain the expansion coefficients for both homogeneous and harmonically trapped Fermi gases. We calculate, for the first time accurately, the third-order virial coefficient. The resulting equation of states at high temperatures is compared with a recent thermodynamic measurement and with Monte Carlo simulations.