Impurity effects on BCS-BEC crossover in ultracold atomic Fermi gases

We present a systematic investigation of the effects of "nonmagnetic" impurities on the s-wave BCS-BEC crossover in atomic Fermi gases within a pairing fluctuation theory. Both pairing and impurity scattering T matrices are treated self-consistently at the same time. While the system is less sensitive to impurity scattering in the Born limit, for strong impurity scatterers, both the frequency and the gap function are highly renormalized, leading to significant suppression of the superfluid T-c, the order parameter, and the superfluid density. We also find the formation of impurity bands and smearing of coherence peak in the fermion density of states, leading to a spectrum weight transfer and finite lifetime of Bogoliubov quasiparticles. In the BCS regime, the superfluidity may be readily destroyed by the impurity of high density, leading to a superfluid-insulator quantum phase transition at zero temperature. In comparison, the superfluidity in unitary and BEC regimes is relatively more robust.