Near a continuous phase transition, systems with different microscopic origins display universal dynamics if their underlying symmetries are compatible. In a thermally quenched system, the Kibble-Zurek mechanism for the creation of topological defects unveils this universality through a characteristic power-law exponent, which captures the dependence of the defect density on the quench rate. Here, we report the observation of the Kibble-Zurek universality in a strongly interacting Fermi superfluid. As the system's microscopic description is tuned from bosonic to fermionic, the quench formation of vortices reveals a constant scaling exponent arising from the U(1) gauge symmetry of the system. For rapid quenches, destructive vortex collisions lead to the saturation of their densities, whose values can be universally scaled by the interaction-dependent area of the vortex cores.
@article{arxiv.1902.06922,
title = {Kibble-Zurek universality in a strongly interacting Fermi superfluid},
author = {Bumsuk Ko and Jee Woo Park and Y. Shin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.06922},
year = {2019}
}