Dynamic study of collective modes in cold fermion gases

Due to the improvement of cooling techniques, recent experiments on ultracold Fermi gases now reach temperatures in the range of the nanokelvin. The main goal of these experiments is to study the so called BEC-BCS crossover. By tuning the external magnetic field around a Feschbach resonance, the scattering length runs from the repulsive side (a>0) to the attractive side (a<0) through the unitarity limit (a infinite). In the BEC side, where the system can form a Bose Einstein condensate of strongly bounded molecules and also in the BCS side where the atoms can form Cooper pairs, the system can become superfluid if the temperature is below the critical temperature. In order to know if the system is superfluid, one has to look at dynamical observables such the collective oscillations of the cloud. The work of this thesis deals with the dynamics of collective modes of ultracold Fermi gases. We have developed a model based on the T-matrix evaluation. We use the Boltzmann transport equation to study the collective modes in all the interaction regimes. This work shows for the first time that the frequency of the radial quadrupole mode can be more than twice the trap frequency, as it has been observed by experiments. The result comes from the incorporation of medium effects. These first results have also shown the necessity to solve numerically the Boltzmann equation. The numerical resolution shows that the determination of the relaxation time with the methods of moments was wrong by a factor 30%. Consequently, the determination of the frequency and the damping of the collective mode by this analytical method is also wrong. Thus, the improvement of this method, by considering the higher order, provides a better agreement with the numerical results. Such a calculation has never been done and shows the necessity to consider the higher order moments in the description of the collective mode of an ultracold Fermi gas in the normal with the Boltzmann equation. (author)