PACS. 03.75.Hh -Static properties of condensates; thermodynamical, statistical and structural properties. PACS. 03.75.Ss -Degenerate Fermi gases. PACS. 05.30.Fk -Fermion systems and electron gas.Abstract. -We present a theory for a superfluid Fermi gas near the BCS-BEC crossover, including pairing fluctuation contributions to the free energy similar to that considered by Nozières and Schmitt-Rink for the normal phase. In the strong coupling limit, our theory is able to recover the Bogoliubov theory of a weakly interacting Bose gas with a molecular scattering length very close to the known exact result. We compare our results with recent Quantum Monte Carlo simulations both for the ground state and at finite temperature. Excellent agreement is found for all interaction strengths where simulation results are available.The recent experimental realization of strongly interacting Fermi gases of 6 Li and 40 K atoms near a Feshbach resonance has opened up the exciting possibility of investigating the crossover from a Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superfluid to a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) [1][2][3][4][5]. In these systems, the inter-atomic interaction strength can be varied by tuning the energy of a near-resonant molecular state with a magnetic field.Below resonance where the s-wave scattering length a is positive, stable diatomic molecules are observed to form a BEC at low temperatures. Above resonance, with a < 0, the molecules dissociate and form a BCS superfluid of fermionic pairs. In the crossover region where the scattering length a is large one can access a new, strongly correlated regime known as the unitary limit [6]. Recent experiments in the crossover regime have found evidence for this transition by measuring low-lying collective modes [2,7,8] and heat capacity [4,9]. These rapid experimental developments constitute an ideal testing ground for theoretical studies of the BCS-BEC crossover. However, theoretical results available in the literature are limited in the strongly correlated unitary regime. The first systematic study of the crossover at zero temperature was provided by Eagles and Leggett based on BCS mean-field equations [10,11]. Later, the effects of pair fluctuations were considered by Nozières and Schmitt-Rink (NSR) at temperatures above the superfluid transition [12,13]. This was recently extended to the superfluid phase by Strinati et al. using finite temperature Green functions [14,15].Extensions of these approaches to take into account the bare Feshbach molecule have also been presented [16,17], with the conclusion that additional two-channel effects can be c EDP Sciences