Generalized Seniority Description of Cold Fermi Gases

We suggest that the extension of the Racah seniority description of strongly interacting fermions in the nuclear shell model is directly generalizable to describe pairing of atoms in cold Fermi systems. We illustrate this by the fermionic pairing in the much studied cold two-component gas of Li atoms. Our pairing interaction is two orders of magnitude stronger than that used in the usual BCS approach. We also explain why the Racah scheme is less applicable to nuclei, and discuss the similarities of the strongly-coupled matter in cold fermion systems and the new form of matter found in RHIC close to T_c.