Super-shell structure in harmonically trapped fermionic gases and its semi-classical interpretation

It was recently shown in self-consistent Hartree–Fock calculations that a harmonically trapped dilute gas of fermionic atoms with a repulsive two-body interaction exhibits a pronounced super-shell structure: the shell fillings due to the spherical harmonic trapping potential are modulated by a beat mode. This changes the ‘magic numbers’ occurring between the beat nodes by half a period. The length and amplitude of the beating mode depends on the strength of the interaction. We give a qualitative interpretation of the beat structure in terms of a semi-classical trace formula that uniformly describes the symmetry breaking U(3) → SO(3) in a three-dimensional harmonic oscillator potential perturbed by an anharmonic term ∝r4 with arbitrary strength. We show that at low Fermi energies (or particle numbers), the beating gross-shell structure of this system is dominated solely by the twofold degenerate circular and (diametrically) pendulating orbits.