  The nature of strongly interacting Fermi gases and magnetism is one of the
most important and studied topics in condensed-matter physics. Still, there are
many open questions. A central issue is under what circumstances strong
short-range repulsive interactions are enough to drive magnetic correlations.
Recent progress in the field of cold atomic gases allows to address this
question in very clean systems where both particle numbers, interactions and
dimensionality can be tuned. Here we study fermionic few-body systems in a one
dimensional harmonic trap using a new rapidly converging effective-interaction
technique, plus a novel analytical approach. This allows us to calculate the
properties of a single spin-down atom interacting with a number of spin-up
particles, a case of much recent experimental interest. Our findings indicate
that, in the strongly interacting limit, spin-up and spin-down particles want
to separate in the trap, which we interpret as a microscopic precursor of
one-dimensional ferromagnetism in imbalanced systems. Our predictions are
directly addressable in current experiments on ultracold atomic few-body
systems.
