We show how dissipative dynamics can give rise to pairing for two-component fermions on a lattice. In particular, we construct a "parent" Liouvillian operator so that a BCS-type state of a given symmetry, e.g. a d-wave state, is reached for arbitrary initial states in the absence of conservative forces. The system-bath couplings describe single-particle, number conserving and quasi-local processes. The pairing mechanism crucially relies on Fermi statistics. We show how such Liouvillians can be realized via reservoir engineering with cold atoms representing a driven dissipative dynamics.
We study the one-dimensional attractive Fermionic Hubbard model under the influence of periodic driving with the time-dependent density matrix renormalization group method. We show that the system can be driven into an unconventional pairing state characterized by a condensate made of Cooper-pairs with a finite center-of-mass momentum similar to a Fulde-Ferrell state. We obtain results both in the laboratory and the rotating reference frames demonstrating that the momentum of the condensate can be finely tuned by changing the ratio between the amplitude and the frequency of the driving. In par…
We study the ground-state properties of one-dimensional mixtures of bosonic and fermionic atoms resonantly coupled to fermionic Feshbach molecules. When the particle densities of fermionic atoms and Feshbach molecules differ, the system undergoes various depletion transitions between binary and ternary mixtures, as a function of the detuning parameter. However, when the particle densities of fermionic atoms and Feshbach molecules are identical, the molecular conversion and disassociation processes induce a gap in a sector of low-energy excitations, and the remaining system can be described by …
Interacting Fermi gases with spin-orbit coupling are responsible for many intriguing phenomena such as topological superfluids and Majorana fermions. Here we characterize theoretically fermionic pairing in a strongly interacting spin-orbit coupled Fermi gas, by using momentum-resolved radio-frequency spectroscopy. We develop a strong-coupling $T$-matrix theory and present a phase diagram near the unitary resonance limit. A smooth transition from atomic to molecular responses in the momentum-resolved spectroscopy is predicted, with a clear signature of anisotropic pairing at and below resonance…
In this perspective we discuss recent theoretical and experimental concepts giving a route to a better understanding of conventional and unconventional pairing mechanisms between opposite-spin fermions arising in one-dimensional mesoscopic systems. With special attention, we focus on the problem of experimental detectability of correlations between particles. We argue that state-of-the-art experiments with few ultracold fermions may finally break an impasse and give pioneering and unquestionable verification of the existence of correlated pairs with non-zero center-of-mass momentum.
We investigate the pairing symmetry of the superfluid state in repulsively interacting three-component (colors) fermionic atoms in optical lattices. When two of the three color-dependent repulsions are much larger than the other, pairing symmetry is an extended s wave, although the superfluid state appears adjacent to the paired Mott insulator in the phase diagram. As the difference between the three repulsions is decreased in square optical lattices, the extended s-wave pairing changes into a nodal s-wave pairing and then into a d-wave pairing. This change in pairing symmetry is attributed to…
We investigate long-range pairing interactions between ultracold fermionic atoms confined in an optical lattice which are mediated by the coupling to a cavity. In the absence of other perturbations, we find three degenerate pairing symmetries for a two-dimensional square lattice. By tuning a weak local atomic interaction via a Feshbach resonance or by tuning a weak magnetic field, the superfluid system can be driven from a topologically trivial s-wave to topologically ordered, chiral superfluids containing Majorana edge states. Our work points out a novel path towards the creation of exotic su…
Within the context of Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov theory, we study the behavior of superfluid Fermi systems when they pass from a small to a large container. Such systems can be now realized thanks to recent progress in experimental techniques. It will allow to better understand pairing properties at overflow and in general in rapidly varying external potentials.
We study two-species fermion gases with attractive interaction in two-dimensional optical lattices producing an array of elongated tube confinements. Focusing on the interplay of Cooper pairing, spin imbalance (or magnetization) and intertube tunneling, we find the pairing gap can exhibit oscillatory behavior both along and across the tubes, reminiscent of a Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) phase. We obtain a Bose-Hubbard-like phase diagram that shows that the magnetization of the system undergoes an incompressible-compressible transition as a function of magnetic field and intertube tu…
We show how the appearance of d-wave pairing in fermionic condensates manifests itself in inelastic light scattering. Specifically, we calculate the Bragg scattering intensity from the dynamic structure factor and the spin susceptibility, which can be inferred from spin flip Raman transitions. This information provides a precise tool with which we can identify nontrivial correlations in the state of the system beyond the information contained in the density profile imaging alone. Due to the lack of Coulomb effects in neutral superfluids, this is also an opportunity to observe the Anderson-Bogo…
We investigate a population-imbalanced two-species fermionic system where the resonantly-paired fermions combine to form bosonic molecules via Feshbach interaction. We study the dynamics of the intrinsic quantum fluctuations of the system. It is shown that the natural fluctuations of the condensate fraction consists of a fixed number of periodic components : indicating that these oscillations do not die out, and are sustained in the mean field dynamics of the system. These frequency components bear distinct signatures of the nature of pairing present in the system. We describe how a time depen…
We discuss the preparation of many-body states of cold fermionic atoms in an optical lattice via controlled dissipative processes induced by coupling the system to a reservoir. Based on a mechanism combining Pauli blocking and phase locking between adjacent sites, we construct complete sets of jump operators describing coupling to a reservoir that leads to dissipative preparation of pairing states for fermions with various symmetries in the absence of direct inter-particle interactions. We discuss the uniqueness of these states, and demonstrate it with small-scale numerical simulations. In the…
Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer State Representation and Pairing in the Fermionic Tonks-Girardeau Gas
Universitat de Barcelona（巴塞罗那大学）；Institut de Ciències del Cosmos, Universitat de Barcelona（巴塞罗那大学宇宙科学研究所）；Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya（加泰罗尼亚理工大学）
We propose a novel possibility of dynamically changing the pairing of superconductors from $s$ wave to $η$ pairing (where the pairs condense at the Brillouin-zone corner momenta) by driving the system with ac fields. We consider a periodically-driven attractive Hubbard model in the strong-coupling regime, and show that the pair-hopping and pair-repulsion terms in the effective Hamiltonian in the Floquet formalism are drastically renormalized in different manners between the two terms, which can change the ground states from an $s$-wave superconductivity to an $η$-pairing superconductivity or a…
We explore novel features of a nonrelativistic fermionic superfluid in which the pairing interaction includes a contribution from the exchange of a dynamical bosonic mode. We show that the dynamical boson exchange (DBE), which causes a retarded pairing interaction and thus violates the Galilean invariance of the fermion sector, generically leads to a quantum reduction of the superfluid density and hence a nonzero normal fraction even at zero temperature. For spin-singlet pairing, the DBE also leads to a nonvanishing spin susceptibility at zero temperature, providing a mechanism for the coexist…
Pairing of mobile charge carriers in doped antiferromagnets plays a key role in the emergence of unconventional superconductivity. In these strongly correlated materials, the pairing mechanism is often assumed to be mediated by magnetic correlations, in contrast to phonon-mediated interactions in conventional superconductors. A precise understanding of the underlying mechanism in real materials is, however, still lacking, and has been driving experimental and theoretical research for the past 40 years. Early theoretical studies established the emergence of binding among dopants in ladder syste…
We investigate numerically the problem of few (one, two) noninteracting spin$-1/2$ fermions in a shallow harmonic trap coupled via contact repulsive interactions to a uniform one-dimensional bath of lattice bosons, described by the Bose-Hubbard model. Through extensive density-matrix renormalization group calculations, we extract the binding energy and the effective mass of quasiparticles, including dressed impurities (polarons) and their two-body bound states (bipolarons), emerging from the effective non-local Casimir interaction between the impurities. We show that the mixture exhibits rathe…
Strongly interacting fermionic atoms are shown to develop $η$-pairing superfluid correlations in a nonequilibrium steady state in the presence of spontaneous emission of light from atoms. On the basis of the Hubbard model subject to spontaneous decay between internal spin states, we show that prohibition of radiative decay due to the Pauli exclusion principle and destructive interference between doublon-decay processes lead to nonequilibrium $η$ pairing. Because of the non-thermal nature of the steady state, pair correlations arise even from a completely uncorrelated infinite-temperature initi…
We study unconventional superfluids of fermionic polar molecules in a two-dimensional bilayer system with dipoles are head-to-tail across the layers. We analyze the critical temperature of several unconventional pairings as a function of different system parameters. The peculiar competition between the $d$- and the $s$- wave pairings is discussed. We show that the experimental observation of such unconventional superfluids requires ulralow temperatures, which opens up new possibilities to realize several topological phases.
We characterize numerically the dominant dynamical regimes in a superfluid ultracold fermionic Josephson junction. Beyond the coherent Josephson plasma regime, we discuss the onset and physical mechanism of dissipation due to the superflow exceeding a characteristic speed, and provide clear evidence distinguishing its physical mechanism across the weakly- and strongly-interacting limits, despite qualitative dynamics of global characteristics being only weakly sensitive to the operating dissipative mechanism. Specifically, dissipation in the strongly interacting regime occurs through the phase-…
Bardeen-Schrieffer-Cooper (BCS) and Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) occur at opposite limits of a continuum of pairing interaction strength between fermions. A crossover between these limits is readily observed in a cold atomic Fermi gas. Whether it occurs in other systems such as the high temperature superconducting cuprates has remained an open question. We uncover here unambiguous evidence for a BCS-BEC crossover in the cuprates by identifying a universal magic gap ratio 2Δ/k_BT_c ~ 6.5 (where Δis the pairing gap and Tc is the transition temperature) at which paired fermion condensates bec…
Respecting the conservation laws of momentum and energy in a many body theory is very important for understanding the transport phenomena. The previous conserving approximation requires that the self-energy of a single particle can be written as a functional derivative of a full dressed Green's function. This condition can not be satisfied in the $G_0G$ t-matrix or pair fluctuation theory which emphasizes the fermion pairing with a stronger than the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) attraction. In the previous work\cite{stressWI}, we have shown that when the temperature is above the superfluid t…
We consider a layered system of fermionic molecules with permanent dipole moments aligned by an external field. The dipole interactions between fermions in adjacent layers are attractive and induce inter-layer pairing. Due to competition for pairing among adjacent layers, the mean-field ground state of the layered system is a dimerized superfluid, with pairing only between every-other layer. We construct an effective Ising-XY lattice model that describes the interplay between dimerization and superfluid phase fluctuations. In addition to the dimerized superfluid ground state, and high temperat…
It is generally believed that the BCS-BEC evolution in fermionic systems with s-wave pairing is a smooth crossover. However, for nonzero orbital-angular-momentum pairing such as p- or d-wave pairing, the system undergoes a quantum phase transition at the point where the chemical potential $μ$ vanishes. In this paper, we study the BCS-BEC quantum phase transition and the collective excitations associated with the order-parameter fluctuations in two-dimensional fermionic systems with p- and d-wave pairings. We show that the quantum phase transition in such systems can be generically traced back …
We observe many-body pairing in a two-dimensional gas of ultracold fermionic atoms at temperatures far above the critical temperature for superfluidity. For this, we use spatially resolved radio-frequency spectroscopy to measure pairing energies spanning a wide range of temperatures and interaction strengths. In the strongly interacting regime where the scattering length between fermions is on the same order as the inter-particle spacing, the pairing energy in the normal phase significantly exceeds the intrinsic two-body binding energy of the system and shows a clear dependence on local densit…
We present a theoretical analysis of the dynamics of a one-dimensional spin-1/2 fermionic gas subject to weak two-body losses. Our approach highlights the crucial role played by spin conservation in the determination of the full time evolution. We focus in particular on the dynamics of a gas that is initially prepared in a Dicke state with fully-symmetric spin wavefunction, in a band insulator, or in a Mott insulator. In the latter case, we investigate the emergence of a steady symmetry-resolved purification of the gas. Our results could help the modelisation and understanding of recent experi…
We determine the zero temperature quantum phase diagram of a p_x+ip_y pairing model based on the exactly solvable hyperbolic Richardson-Gaudin model. We present analytical and large-scale numerical results for this model. In the continuum limit, the exact solution exhibits a third-order quantum phase transition, separating a strong-pairing from a weak-pairing phase. The mean field solution allows to connect these results to other models with p_x+ip_y pairing order. We define an experimentally accessible characteristic length scale, associated with the size of the Cooper pairs, that diverges at…
Superradiance enhances and suppresses fermionic pairing based on universal critical scaling in two order parameters systems
State Key Laboratory for Mesoscopic Physics, School of Physics, Frontiers Science Center for Nano-optoelectronics, Peking University（北京大学物理学院介观物理国家重点实验室前沿纳米光电子学中心）；Peking University（北京大学）；Beijing Academy of Quantum Information Sciences（北京量子信息科学研究院）
We study a one-dimensional Fermi gas in the presence of dissipative coupling to environment through the Lindblad equation. The dissipation involves energy exchange with the environment and favours the relaxation of electrons to excitations. After switching on the dissipation, the system approaches a steady state, which is described by a generalized Gibbs ensemble. The fermionic single particle density matrix resembles deceivingly to that in a hermitian interaction quench. It decays inversely with the distance for short times due to the fermionic correlations in the initial state, which changes…
We determine the superfluid transition temperatures $T_c$ and the ground states of the attractive Hubbard model and find new insulating phases associated with non-integer filling at sufficiently strong pairing attraction $|U|$. These states, distinct from band and Mott insulating phases, derive from pair localization; pair hopping at large $|U|$ and high densities is impeded by inter-site, inter-pair repulsive interactions. The best way to detect the breakdown of superfluidity is using fermionic optical lattices which should reveal new forms of ``bosonic'' order, reflecting ground state pairin…
We study the soliton modes carrying fractional quantum numbers in one-dimensional superfluids. In the $s$-wave pairing superfluid with the phase of the order parameter twisted by opposite angles $\pm φ/2$ at the two ends there is an emergent complex $Z_2$ soliton mode carrying fractional spin number $φ/(2π)$ if there is only one pairing branch. We demonstrate that in finite systems of length $L$, the spin density for one pairing branch in the presence of a single soliton mode consists of two terms, a localized spin density profile carrying fractional quantum number $φ/(2π)$, and a uniform back…
We study the behavior of an extended fermionic wire coupled to a local stochastic field. Since the quantum jump operator is Hermitian and quadratic in fermionic operators, it renders the model soluble, allowing investigation of the properties of the non-equilibrium steady-state and the role of dissipation-induced fluctuations. We derive a closed set of equations of motion solely for the two-point correlator; on the other hand, we find, surprisingly, that the many-body state exhibits non-Gaussian correlations. Density-density correlation function demonstrates a crossover from a regime of weak d…
We investigate the interplay between unitary dynamics after a quantum quench and localized dissipation in a noninteracting fermionic chain. In particular, we consider the effect of gain and loss processes, for which fermions are added and removed incoherently. We focus on the hydrodynamic limit of large distances from the source of dissipation and of long times, with their ratio being fixed. In this limit, the localized dissipation gives rise to an effective delta potential (dissipative impurity), and the time-evolution of the local correlation functions admits a simple hydrodynamic descriptio…
We study the transport, decoherence and dissipation of an impurity interacting with a bath of free fermions in a one-dimensional lattice. Numerical simulations are made with the time-evolving block decimation method. We introduce a mass imbalance between the impurity and bath particles and find that the fastest decoherence occurs for a light impurity in a bath of heavy particles. By contrast, the fastest dissipation of energy occurs when the masses are equal. We present a simple model for decoherence in the heavy bath limit, and a linear density response description of the interaction which pr…
We compute the orbital angular momentum $L_z$ of an s-wave paired superfluid in the presence of an axisymmetric multiply quantized vortex. For vortices with winding number $|k| > 1$, we find that in the weak-pairing BCS regime $L_z$ is significantly reduced from its value $\hbar N k/2$ in the Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) regime, where $N$ is the total number of fermions. This deviation results from the presence of unpaired fermions in the BCS ground state, which arise as a consequence of spectral flow along the vortex sub-gap states. We support our results analytically and numerically by s…
We study the emergence of dissipation in an atomic Josephson junction between weakly-coupled superfluid Fermi gases. We find that vortex-induced phase slippage is the dominant microscopic source of dissipation across the BEC-BCS crossover. We explore different dynamical regimes by tuning the bias chemical potential between the two superfluid reservoirs. For small excitations, we observe dissipation and phase coherence to coexist, with a resistive current followed by well-defined Josephson oscillations. We link the junction transport properties to the phase-slippage mechanism, finding that vort…
We determine the superfluid transition temperature $T_c$ and related finite temperature phase diagrams for the entire BCS-Bose Einstein condensation crossover in a homogeneous mixture of $^{6}$Li and $^{40}$K atoms with population imbalance. Our work is motivated by the recent observation of an inter-species Feshbach resonance. Pairing fluctuation effects, which significantly reduce $T_c$ from the onset temperature for pairing ($T^*$), provide reasonable estimates of $T_c$ and indicate that the inter-species superfluid phase should be accessible in future experiments. Although a generalized-Sa…
We predict a new mechanism to induce collective excitations and a nonequilibrium phase transition of fermionic superfluids via a sudden switch-on of two-body loss, for which we extend the BCS theory to fully incorporate a change in particle number. We find that a sudden switch-on of dissipation induces an amplitude oscillation of the superfluid order parameter accompanied by a chirped phase rotation as a consequence of particle loss. We demonstrate that when dissipation is introduced to one of the two superfluids coupled via a Josephson junction, it gives rise to a nonequilibrium dynamical pha…
We show, based on microscopic models, that fermionic band insulators with multiple bands and strong interband attraction are generically unstable towards nonzero momentum Cooper pairing leading to a pair density wave (PDW) superfluid state. Our first model considers a band insulating state of fermionic atoms in a three-dimensional cubic optical lattice. We show that this insulator is unstable towards an incommensurate PDW in the vicinity of a Feshbach resonance. Our second model is a two-band tight binding model relevant to electrons in solids; we show that the insulating state of this model h…
A system of a few attractively interacting fermionic $^6$Li atoms in one-dimensional harmonic confinement is investigated. Non-trivial inter-particle correlations induced by interactions in a particle-imbalanced system are studied in the framework of the noise correlation. In this way, it is shown that evident signatures of strongly correlated fermionic pairs in the Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov state are present in the system and they can be detected by measurements directly accessible within state-of-the-art techniques. The results convincingly show that the exotic pairing mechanism is a …
We consider the problem of spin-triplet p-wave superfluid pairing with total spin projection $m_s=0$ in atomic Fermi gas across the Feshbach resonance. We allow for imbalanced populations and take into account the effects due to presence of a parabolic trapping potential. Within the mean-field approximation for the one- and two-channel pairing models we show that depending on the distance from the center of a trap at least two superfluid states will have the lowest energy. Superfluid shells which emerge in a trap may have two out of three angular components of the p-wave superfluid order param…
We investigate the BCS-BEC crossover in a bilayer system of fermionic dipoles at zero temperature using the fixed-node diffusion Monte Carlo technique. The dipoles are confined on two parallel planes separated by a distance $λ$ and are aligned perpendicular to the planes by an external field. The interlayer pairing, which is responsible for the superfluid behavior of the system, crosses from a weak to a strong-coupling regime by reducing the separation distance $λ$. For a fixed in-plane density, equal in the two layers, we calculate the ground-state energy, the chemical potential, the pairing …
We investigate the phase diagram of two-component fermions in the BCS-BEC crossover. Using functional renormalization group equations we calculate the effect of quantum fluctuations on the fermionic self-energy parametrized by a wavefunction renormalization, an effective Fermi radius and the gap. This allows us to follow the modifications of the Fermi surface and the dispersion relation for fermionic excitations throughout the whole crossover region. We also determine the critical temperature of the second order phase transition to superfluidity. Our results are in agreement with BCS theory in…
We investigate the BCS pairing in a mixture of fermionic polar molecules with two different hyperfine states. We derive a set of coupled gap equations and find that this system supports both spin-singlet and -triplet BCS pairs. We also calculate the critical temperatures and the angular dependence of order parameters. In addition, by tuning short-range interaction between inter-species molecules, the transition between singlet and triplet paired states may be realized.
This paper gives a survey of a diagrammatic approach for fermionic pairing fluctuations, which are relevant to the BCS-BEC crossover realized with ultracold Fermi gases. Emphasis will be given to the physical intuition about the relevant physical processes that can be associated with this approach. Specific results will be presented for thermodynamic and dynamical quantities, where a critical comparison with alternative diagrammatic approaches will also be attempted.
A possibility of the condensation of excitations with a non-zero momentum in rectilinearly moving and rotating superfluid bosonic and fermionic (with Cooper pairing) media is considered in terms of a phenomenological order-parameter functional at zero and non-zero temperature. The results might be applicable to the description of bosonic systems like superfluid $^4$He, ultracold atomic Bose gases, charged pion and kaon condensates in rotating neutron stars, and various superconducting fermionic systems with pairing, like proton and color-superconducting components in compact stars, metallic su…
We investigate the phenomenon of fermionic pairing with mismatched Fermi surfaces in a two-species system in the presence of Feshbach resonance, where the resonantly-paired fermions combine to form bosonic molecules. We observe that the Feshbach parameters control the critical temperature of the gapped BCS superfluid state, and also determine the range over which a gapless breached pair state may exist. Demanding the positivity of the superfluid density, it is shown that although a breached pair state with two Fermi surfaces is always unstable, its single Fermi-surface counterpart can be stabl…
Interactions between particles are usually a resource for quantum computing, making quantum many-body systems intractable by any known classical algorithm. In contrast, noise is typically considered as being inimical to quantum many-body correlations, ultimately leading the system to a classically tractable state. This work shows that noise represented by two-body processes, such as pair loss, plays the same role as many-body interactions and makes otherwise classically simulable systems universal for quantum computing. We analyze such processes in detail and establish a complexity transition …
We study theoretically interspecies Cooper pairing in a fermionic system with SU(2)xSU(6) sym- metry. We show that, with suitable unitary transformations, the order parameter for the ground state can be reduced to only two non-vanishing complex components. The ground state has a large degeneracy. We find that while some Goldstone modes have linear dispersions, others are quadratic at low frequencies. We compare our results with the case of SU(N).
The Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) phase, a superconducting state with non-zero total momentum Cooper pairs in a large magnetic field, was first predicted about 50 years ago, and since then became an important concept in many branches of physics. Despite intensive search in various materials, unambiguous experimental evidence for the FFLO phase is still lacking in experiments. In this paper, we show that both FF (uniform order parameter with plane-wave phase) and LO phase (spatially varying order parameter amplitude) can be observed using fermionic cold atoms in spin-orbit coupled opt…
