Topological Density Correlations in a Fermi Gas

Abstract

A Fermi gas of non-interacting electrons, or ultra-cold fermionic atoms, has a quantum ground state defined by a region of occupancy in momentum space known as the Fermi sea. The Euler characteristic $\chi_F$ of the Fermi sea serves to topologically classify these gapless fermionic states. The topology of a $D$ dimensional Fermi sea is physically encoded in the $D+1$ point equal time density correlation function. In this work, we first present a simple proof of this fact by showing that the evaluation of the correlation function can be formulated in terms of a triangulation of the Fermi sea with a collection of points, links and triangles and their higher dimensional analogs. We then make use of the topological $D+1$ point density correlation to reveal universal structures of the more general $M$ point density correlation functions in a $D$ dimensional Fermi gas. Two experimental methods are proposed for observing these correlations in $D=2$. In cold atomic gases imaged by quantum gas microscopy, our analysis supports the feasibility of measuring the third order density correlation, from which $\chi_F$ can be reliably extracted in systems with as few as around 100 atoms. For solid-state electron gases, we propose measuring correlations in the speckle pattern of intensity fluctuations in nonlinear X-ray scattering experiments.