We study s-wave pairing of population imbalanced Fermi atoms in quasi two dimensions using a mean field theory. At zero temperature, we map out the phase diagram in the entire Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer-Bose Einstein condensation (BCS-BEC) crossover region by investigating the effect of weak atom tunneling between layers. We find that the superfluid phase stabilizes as one decreases the atom tunneling between layers. This allows one to control the superfluid-normal first order phase transition by tuning a single experimental parameter. Further, we find that a tunneling induced polarized superfluid phase appears in a narrow parameter region in the BEC regime. At Finite temperatures, we use a Landau-Ginzberg functional approach to investigate the possibility of spatially inhomogeneous Fulde-Ferrel-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) phase in the weakly interacting BCS limit near the tricritical point of spatially homogenous superfluid, FFLO, and normal phases. We find that the normal-FFLO phase transition is first order transition as opposed to the continues transition predicted in zero temperature theories.
We investigate the density profiles of a partially polarized trapped Fermi gas in the BCS-BEC crossover region using mean field theory within the local density approximation. Within this approximation the gas is phase separated into concentric shells. We describe how the structure of these shells depends upon the polarization and the interaction strength. A Comparison with experiments yields insight into the possibility of a polarized superfluid phase.
We use a T-matrix approximation to calculate the single particle spectrum of the normal state of a gas of Fermionic atoms at low temperature. In the strongly interacting regime of the polarized gas, we find that the spectrum is separated in two branches, leading to a double-peaked radiofrequency spectral feature.
We investigate the superfluid transition temperature of quasi-two-dimensional imbalanced Fermi gases beyond the mean-field approximation, through the second-order (or induced) interaction effects. For a balanced Fermi system the transition temperature is suppressed by a factor $\approx 2.72$. For imbalanced Fermi systems, the polarization and transition temperature of the tricritical point are significantly reduced as the two-body binding energy $|ε_B|$ increases.
We present a theoretical study of the collective excitations of a trapped imbalanced fermion gas at unitarity, when the system consists of a superfluid core and a normal outer shell. We formulate the relevant boundary conditions and treat the normal shell both hydrodynamically and collisionlessly. For an isotropic trap, we calculate the mode frequencies as a function of trap polarization. Out-of-phase modes with frequencies below the trapping frequency are obtained for the case of a hydrodynamic normal shell. For the collisionless case, we calculate the monopole mode frequencies, and find that…
We consider the ground state of a single "spin-down" impurity atom interacting attractively with a "spin-up" atomic Fermi gas. By constructing variational wave functions for polarons, molecules and trimers, we perform a detailed study of the transitions between each of these dressed bound states as a function of mass ratio $r=m_\uparrow/m_\downarrow$ and interaction strength. We find that the presence of a Fermi sea enhances the stability of the $p$-wave trimer, which can be viewed as a Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) molecule that has bound an additional majority atom. For sufficientl…
We present a series of theoretical studies of the boundary between a superfluid and normal region in a partially polarized gas of strongly interacting fermions. We present mean-field estimates of the surface energy in this boundary as a function of temperature and scattering length. We discuss the structure of the domain wall, and use a previously introduced phenomonological model to study its influence on experimental observables. Our microscopic mean-field calculations are not consistent with the magnitude of the surface tension found from our phenomonological modelling of data from the Rice…
We present a theory for a lattice array of weakly coupled one-dimensional ultracold attractive Fermi gases (1D `tubes') with spin imbalance, where strong intratube quantum fluctuations invalidate mean field theory. We first construct an effective field theory, which treats spin-charge mixing exactly, based on the Bethe ansatz solution of the 1D single tube problem. We show that the 1D Fulde-Ferrel-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) state is a two-component Luttinger liquid, and its elementary excitations are fractional states carrying both charge and spin. We analyze the instability of the 1D FFLO stat…
We compute the phase diagram of strongly interacting fermions in one dimension at finite temperature, with mass and spin imbalance. By including the possibility of the existence of a spatially inhomogeneous ground state, we find regions where spatially varying superfluid phases are favored over homogeneous phases. We obtain estimates for critical values of the temperature, mass and spin imbalance, above which these phases disappear. Finally, we show that an intriguing relation exists between the general structure of the phase diagram and the binding energies of the underlying two-body bound-st…
A growing expertise to engineer, manipulate and probe different cold-atom analogs of electronic condensed matter systems allows to probe properties of exotic pairing. We study paired states of spin-imbalanced ultracold atomic system of fermions with attractive short-range interactions in one-dimensional traps. Calculations are done using the Bethe Ansatz technique and the trap is incorporated into the solution via a local density approximation. The thermodynamic-Bethe-Ansatz equations are solved numerically and different local density profiles are calculated for zero and finite temperatures. A…
We investigate the low-lying compression modes of a unitary Fermi gas with imbalanced spin populations. For low polarization, the strong coupling between the two spin components leads to a hydrodynamic behavior of the cloud. For large population imbalance we observe a decoupling of the oscillations of the two spin components, giving access to the effective mass of the Fermi polaron, a quasi-particle composed of an impurity dressed by particle-hole pair excitations in a surrounding Fermi sea. We find $m^*/m=1.17(10)$, in agreement with the most recent theoretical predictions.
We present an exact Quantum Monte Carlo study of the effect of unequal masses on pair formation in Fermionic systems with population imbalance loaded into optical lattices. We have considered three forms of the attractive interaction and find in all cases that the system is unstable and collapses as the mass difference increases and that the ground state becomes an inhomogeneous collapsed state. We also address the question of canonical vs grand canonical ensemble and its role, if any, in stabilizing certain phases.
We present majority and minority radiofrequency (RF) spectra of strongly interacting imbalanced Fermi gases of Li-6. We observed a smooth evolution in the nature of pairing correlations from pairing in the superfluid region to polaron binding in the highly polarized normal region. The imbalance induces quasiparticles in the superfluid region even at very low temperature. This leads to a local bimodal spectral response, which allows us to determine the superfluid gap Δand the Hartree energy U.
Motivated by the prospect of optical lattice experiments with two-component Fermi gases consisting of different atomic species such as Li and K, we calculate the energies for N fermions under harmonic confinement as a function of the mass- and trap-imbalance, i.e., as a function of the ratio between the masses and frequencies of species one and two, using microscopic approaches. Our energies for N=2 through 6 can be used to determine the energetically most favorable configuration for a given number of atoms per species of a deep lattice in which each lattice site is approximately harmonic and …
We study the zero temperature ground state of a two-dimensional atomic Fermi gas with chemical potential and population imbalance in the mean-field approximation. All calculations are performed in terms of the two-body binding energy $ε_B$, whose variation allows to investigate the evolution from the BEC to the BCS regimes. By means of analytical and exact expressions we show that, similarly to what is found in three dimensions, at fixed chemical potentials, BCS is the ground state until the critical imbalance $h_c$ after which there is a first-order phase transition to the normal state. We fi…
We show that the Hubbard Hamiltonian with particle-assisted tunneling rates --recently proposed to model a fermionic mixture near a broad Feshbach resonance-- displays a ground state phase diagram with superfluid, insulating, and phase separated regimes. In the latter case, when the populations are balanced the two phases coexist in microscopic antiferromagnetic domains. Macroscopic phase segregation into a high-density superfluid of molecules, and a low-density Fermi liquid of single atoms appears in the density profile above a critical polarization p_c.
The attractive Fermi-Hubbard Hamiltonian is solved via the Bogoliubov-de Gennes formalism to analyze the ground state phases of population imbalanced fermion mixtures in harmonically trapped two-dimensional optical lattices. In the low density limit the superfluid order parameter modulates in the radial direction towards the trap edges to accommodate the unpaired fermions that are pushed away from the trap center with a single peak in their density. However in the high density limit while the order parameter modulates in the radial direction towards the trap center for low imbalance, it also m…
We investigate different physical properties of a spin imbalanced fermionic superfluid described by an attractive Hubbard model in presence of a harmonic trap. To characterize the ground state of such a system, we compute various correlation functions, such as pairing, density and current correlations To underscore the effect of the trap, we compute these quantities as a function of strength of the trapping potential. A distinguishing feature of a superfluid state with population imbalance, is the appearance of a phase with spatially modulating gap function, called the Fulde- Ferrell-Larkin-Ov…
We analyze the effects of imbalancing the populations of two-component trapped fermions in the BEC (strong-coupling) limit of the attractive interaction between fermions of different components. In particular, we derive a set of coupled equations which describe composite bosons and excess fermions in this limit, starting from the gap equation with two different fermionic chemical potentials. Care is used to include in these equations the processes leading to the correct dimer-dimer and dimer-fermion scattering lengths, which require us to consider beyond-mean-field effects. Numerical results a…
The density distributions of the two components of a trapped, ultracold Fermi gas with population imbalance reveal the effect of imbalance on superfluid pairing. We develop a path-integral derivation of the density, that takes into account both fluctuations beyond mean-field and effects of nonzero temperature. The calculated density profiles compare favorably to the measured density profiles, and illustrate the necessity to incorporate both quantum fluctuations and finite temperature effects. The temperature dependence of the density profiles, especially near the superfluid-normal interface, a…
We study the possibility of angular Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) state, in which the rotation symmetry is spontaneously broken, in population imbalanced fermion gases near the BCS-BEC crossover. We investigate the superfluid gases at low temperatures on the basis of the Bogoliubov-de Gennes equation, and examine the stability against thermal fluctuations using the T-matrix approach beyond the local-density approximation (LDA). We find that the angular FFLO state is stabilized in the gases confined in the toroidal trap but not in the harmonic trap. The angular FFLO state is stable ne…
We consider density-imbalanced Fermi gases of atoms in the strongly interacting, i.e. unitarity, regime. The Bogoliubov-deGennes equations for a trapped superfluid are solved. They take into account the finite size of the system, as well as give rise to both phase separation and FFLO type oscillations in the order parameter. We show how radio-frequency spectroscopy reflects the phase separation, and can provide direct evidence of the FFLO-type oscillations via observing the nodes of the order parameter.
We argue that, for the recent experiments with imbalanced fermion gases, a temperature difference may occur between the normal (N) and the gapped superfluid (SF) phase. Using the mean-field formalism, we study particle scattering off the N-SF interface from the deep BCS to the unitary regime. We show that the thermal conductivity across the interface drops exponentially fast with increasing $h/k_B T$, where $h$ is the chemical potential imbalance. This implies a blocking of thermal equilibration between the N and the SF phase. We also provide a possible mechanism for the creation of gap oscill…
We investigate two-component attractive Fermi gases with imbalanced spin populations in trapped one dimensional configurations. The ground state properties are determined within local density approximation, starting from the exact Bethe-ansatz equations for the homogeneous case. We predict that the atoms are distributed according to a two-shell structure: a partially polarized phase in the center of the trap and either a fully paired or a fully polarized phase in the wings. The partially polarized core is expected to be a superfluid of the FFLO type. The size of the cloud as well as the critic…
We study population imbalanced Fermi mixtures under quasi-two-dimensional confinement at zero temperature. Using mean-field theory and the local-density approximation, we study the ground state configuration throughout the BEC-BCS crossover. We find the trapped system to be either fully normal or to consist of a superfluid core surrounded by a normal shell, which is itself either fully or partially polarized. Upon changing the trap imbalance, the trap configuration may undergo continuous transitions between the different ground states. Finally, we argue that thermal equilibration throughout th…
