Collective molecule formation in a degenerate Fermi gas via a Feshbach resonance.

We model collisionless collective conversion of a degenerate Fermi gas of atoms into bosonic molecules via a Feshbach resonance, treating the bosonic molecules as a classical field and seeding the pairing amplitudes with random phases. A dynamical instability of the Fermi sea against association with molecules drives the conversion. The model qualitatively reproduces several experimental observations [Regal et al., Nature (London), (2003)]. We predict that the initial temperature of the Fermi gas sets the limit for the efficiency of atom-molecule conversion.