We study a system of $N$ noninteracting spinless fermions in a confining double-well potential in one dimension. We show that when the Fermi energy is close to the value of the potential at its local maximum, physical properties, such as the average density and the fermion position correlation functions, display a universal behavior that depends only on the local properties of the potential near its maximum. This behavior describes the merging of two Fermi gases, which are disjoint at sufficiently low Fermi energies. We describe this behavior in terms of a correlation kernel that we compute analytically and we call it the inverted parabola kernel. As an application, we calculate the mean and variance of the number of particles in an interval of size $2L$ centered around the position of the local maximum, for sufficiently small $L$. We discuss the possibility of observing our results in experiments, as well as extensions to nonzero temperature and to higher space dimensions.

• Received 3 February 2020
• Accepted 16 March 2020

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.101.053602