Abrupt onset of pairing points to best theories for describing ultra-cold fermi gases

A recent experimental study of the high-energy excitations in unitary Fermi gases, conducted at Swinburne University of Technology, resolves a long-standing debate about what happens at the microscopic level when matter transitions into a superfluid state. Correlations between pairs of atoms in the ultra-cold gas were found to grow suddenly as the system was cooled below the superfluid transition temperature, rather than appear gradually at higher temperatures, as some theories have predicted.