  We demonstrate that an undamped few-body precursor of the Higgs mode can be
investigated in a harmonically trapped Fermi gas. Using exact diagonalisation,
the lowest monopole mode frequency is shown to depend non-monotonically on the
interaction strength, having a minimum in a crossover region. The minimum
deepens with increasing particle number, reflecting that the mode is the
few-body analogue of a many-body Higgs mode in the superfluid phase, which has
a vanishing frequency at the quantum phase transition point to the normal
phase. We show that this mode mainly consists of coherent excitations of
time-reversed pairs, and that it can be selectively excited by modulating the
interaction strength, using for instance a Feshbach resonance in cold atomic
gases.
