Pair formation in Fermi systems with population imbalance in one- and two-dimensional optical lattices*

I will discuss pairing in fermionic systems in one- and two-dimensional optical lattices with population imbalance. This will be done in the context of the attractive fermionic Hubbard model using the Stochastic Green Function algorithm in d=1 while for d=2 we use Determinant Quantum Monte Carlo. This is the first exact QMC study examining the effects of finite temperature which is very important in experiments on ultra-cold atoms. Our results show that, in the ground state, the dominant pairing mechanism is at nonzero center of mass momentum, i.e. FFLO. I will then discuss the effect of finite temperature in the uniform and confined systems and present finite temperature phase diagrams. The numerical results will be compared with experiments.