In previous reports (arXiv:0901.2487, arXiv:1007.0745), we introduced a new fermionic variational wavefunction, suitable for interacting multi-species systems and sustaining superfluidity. This disentangled wavefunction contains a new quantum index. Here we introduce a general spin triplet version of this wavefunction.
In a previous report (arxiv:0901.2487), we introduced a new fermionic variational wavefunction, suitable for interacting multi-species systems and sustaining superfluidity. This wavefunction contains a new quantum index. Here we introduce a spin triplet version of this wavefunction, with parallel spin pairs only. We also present a single fermion species wavefunction, which may be relevant for the problem of the BCS to BEC transition.
It has been widely believed that half quantum vortices are indispensable to realize topological stable Majorana zero modes and non-Abelian anyons in spinful superconductors/superfluids. Contrary to this wisdom, we here demonstrate that integer quantum vortices in spinful superconductors can host topologically stable Majorana zero modes because of the mirror symmetry. The symmetry protected Majorana fermions may exhibit non-Abelian anyon braiding.
Bosons with non-zero spin exhibit a rich variety of superfluid and insulating phases. Most phases support coherent spin oscillations, which have been the focus of numerous recent experiments. These spin oscillations are Rabi oscillations between discrete levels deep in the insulator, while deep in the superfluid they can be oscillations in the orientation of a spinful condensate. We describe the evolution of spin oscillations across the superfluid-insulator quantum phase transition. For transitions with an order parameter carrying spin, the damping of such oscillations is determined by the sca…
The possible stable singular vortex (SV) and half-quantum vortex (HQV) of the superfluid $^3$He-A phase confined in restricted geometries are investigated. The associated low-energy excitations are calculated in connection with the possible existence of Majorana zero modes obeying non-Abelian statistics. The energetics between those vortices is carefully examined using the standard Ginzburg-Landau (GL) functional with a strong-coupling correction. The Fermi liquid effect, which is not included in the GL functional, is considered approximately within the London approach. This allows us to deter…
We introduce a new fermionic variational wavefunction, generalizing the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) wavefunction, which is suitable for interacting multi-species spinful systems and sustaining superfluidity. Applications range from quark matter to the high temperature superconductors. A wide class of Hamiltonians, comprising interactions and hybridization of arbitrary momentum dependence between different fermion species, can be treated in a comprehensive manner. This is the case, as both the intra-species and the inter-species interactions are treated on equally rigorous footing, which is…
We present a rigorous derivation of the BCS gap equation for superfluid fermionic gases with point interactions. Our starting point is the BCS energy functional, whose minimizer we investigate in the limit when the range of the interaction potential goes to zero.
Whether it occurs in superconductors, helium-3 or inside a neutron star, fermionic superfluidity requires pairing of fermions, particles with half-integer spin. For an equal mixture of two states of fermions ("spin up" and "spin down"), pairing can be complete and the entire system will become superfluid. When the two populations of fermions are unequal, not every particle can find a partner. Will the system nevertheless stay superfluid? Here we study this intriguing question in an unequal mixture of strongly interacting ultracold fermionic atoms. The superfluid region vs population imbalance …
We study fermionic superfluidity in strongly anisotropic optical lattices with attractive interactions utilizing the cluster DMFT method, and focusing in particular on the role of non-local quantum fluctuations. We show that non-local quantum fluctuations impact the BCS superfluid transition dramatically. Moreover, we show that exotic superfluid states with delicate order parameter structure, such as the Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov phase driven by spin population imbalance, can emerge even in the presence of such strong fluctuations.
We discuss the orbital angular momentum (OAM) and the edge mass current in neutral fermionic superfluids with broken time reversal symmetry. Recent mean field studies imply that total OAM of a uniform superfluid depends on boundary conditions and is not a thermodynamic quantity. We point out that this does not conflict with thermodynamics, because there is no intensive external field conjugate to OAM with which a uniform superfluid is stable in the thermodynamic limit, in sharp contrast to the orbital magnetization in a non-superfluid system. We establish a simple physical picture for the sens…
We study the effect of mass imbalance on the phase diagram of a two-component fermionic mixture with attractive interactions in optical lattices. Using static and dynamical mean-field theories, we show that the pure superfluid phase is stable for all couplings when the mass imbalance is smaller than a limiting value. For larger imbalance, phase separation between a superfluid and a charge-density wave takes place when the coupling exceeds a critical strength. The harmonic trap induces a spatial segregation of the two phases, with a rapid variation of the density at the boundary.
The physical properties of arbitrary half-integer spins $F = N - 1/2$ fermionic cold atoms trapped in a one-dimensional optical lattice are investigated by means of a low-energy approach. Two different superfluid phases are found for $F \ge 3/2$ depending on whether a discrete symmetry is spontaneously broken or not: an unconfined BCS pairing phase and a confined molecular superfluid instability made of $2N$ fermions. We propose an experimental distinction between these phases for a gas trapped in an annular geometry. The confined-unconfined transition is shown to belong to the $Z_N$ generaliz…
This thesis is concerned with ground state properties of two-dimensional fermionic superfluids, in which fluctuation effects like the renormalization of the order parameter or infrared singularities are important. In the superfluid state, the fermionic two-particle vertex develops rich and singular dependences on momentum and frequency, for which an efficient parametrization in terms of boson-exchange interactions in the particle-hole and particle-particle channels is formulated. Based on this decomposition of the vertex, flow equations for the effective interactions are derived, extending exi…
Understanding the origins of unconventional superconductivity has been a major focus of condensed matter physics for many decades. While many questions remain unanswered, experiments have found that the systems with the highest critical temperatures tend to be layered materials where superconductivity occurs in two-dimensional (2D) structures. However, to what extent the remarkable stability of these strongly correlated 2D superfluids is related to their reduced dimensionality is still an open question. In this work, we use dilute gases of ultracold fermionic atoms as a model system to directl…
We consider trapped atomic Fermi gases with Feshbach-resonance enhanced interactions in pseudogap and superfluid temperatures. We calculate the spectrum of RF(or laser)-excitations for transitions that transfer atoms out of the superfluid state. The spectrum displays the pairing gap and also the contribution of unpaired atoms, i.e. in-gap excitations. The results support the conclusion that a superfluid, where pairing is a many-body effect, was observed in recent experiments on RF spectroscopy of the pairing gap.
We calculate the effect of order parameter fluctuations on the fermionic single-particle excitations in the superfluid state of neutral fermions interacting with short range attractive forces. We show that in dimensions D \leq 3 the singular effective interaction between the fermions mediated by the gapless Bogoliubov-Anderson mode prohibits the existence of well-defined quasi-particles. We explicitly calculate the single-particle spectral function in the BEC regime in D=3 and show that in this case the quasi-particle residue and the density of states are logarithmically suppressed.
We consider a generic two-dimensional system of fermionic particles with attractive interactions and no disorder. If time-reversal symmetry is absent, it is possible to obtain incompressible insulating states in addition to the superfluid at zero temperature. The superfluid-insulator phase transition is found to be second order in type-II systems using a perturbative analysis of Cooper pairing instability in quantum Hall states of unpaired fermions. We obtain the pairing phase diagram as a function of chemical potential (density) and temperature. However, a more careful analysis presented here…
We show that in s-wave superfluids of cold fermionic atoms with laser-field-generated effective spin-orbit interactions, a topological phase with gapless edge states and Majorana fermion quasiparticles obeying the non-Abelian statistics is realized in the case with a large Zeeman magnetic field. Our scenario provides a promising approach for quantum computation manipulating non-Abelian anyons via an s-wave Feshbach resonance.
The superfluid-insulator transitions of the fermionic atoms in optical lattices are investigated by the two-site dynamical mean-field theory. It is shown that the Mott transition occurs as a result of the multiband effects. The quasiparticle weight in the superfluid state decreases significantly, as the system approaches the Mott transition point. By changing the interaction and the orbital splitting, we obtain the phase diagram at half filling. The numerical results are discussed in comparison with the effective boson model.
We suggest a microscopic model describing the nonlocal ac response of a pair of Majorana states in fermionic superfluids beyond the tunneling approximation. The time-dependent perturbations of quasiparticle transport are shown to excite finite period beating of the wavefunction between the distant Majorana states. We propose an experimental test to measure the characteristic time scales of quasiparticle transport through the pair of Majorana states defining, thus, quantitative characteristics of nonlocality known to be a generic feature of Majorana particles.
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…
In this paper, a topological superfluid phase with Chern number C=1 possessing gapless edge states and non-Abelian anyons is designed in a C=1 topological insulator proximity to an s-wave superfluid on an optical lattice with the effective gauge field and layer-dependent Zeeman field coupled to ultracold fermionic atoms pseudo spin. We also study its topological properties and calculate the phase stiffness by using the random-phase-approximation approach. Finally we derive the temperature of the Kosterlitz-Thouless transition by means of renormalized group theory. Owning to the existence of no…
We theoretically investigate superfluidity in a strongly interacting Fermi gas confined to two dimensions at finite temperature. Using a Gaussian pair fluctuation theory in the superfluid phase, we calculate the superfluid density and determine the critical temperature and chemical potential at the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition. We propose that the transition can be unambiguously demonstrated in cold-atom experiments by stirring the superfluid Fermi gas using a red detuned laser beam, to identify the characteristic jump in the local Landau critical velocity at the superfluid-norma…
The first detailed comparison between ab initio calculations of finite fermionic superfluid systems, performed recently by Chang and Bertsch [Phys. Rev. A 76, 021603(R), (2007)] and by von Stecher, Greene and Blume [e-print arXiv:00705:0671v1], and the extension of the density functional theory Superfluid Local Density Approximation (SLDA) is presented. It is shown that SLDA reproduces the total energies, number density distributions in inhomogeneous systems along with the energy of the normal state in homogeneous systems. Unlike the Kohn-Sham LDA, in SLDA the effective fermion mass differs fr…
We propose a model to realize a fermionic superfluid state in an optical lattice circumventing the cooling problem. Our proposal exploits the idea of tuning the interaction in a characteristically low entropy state, a band-insulator in an optical bilayer system, to obtain a superfluid. By performing a detailed analysis of the model including fluctuations and augmented by a variational quantum Monte Carlo calculations of the ground state, we show that the superfluid state obtained has high transition temperature of the order of the hopping energy. Our system is designed to suppress other compet…
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…
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…
It is found theoretically based on the Ginzburg-Landau framework that p-wave superfluids of neutral atom gases in three dimension harmonic traps exhibit spontaneous mass current at rest, whose direction depends on trap geometry. Under rotation various types of the order parameter textures are stabilized, including Mermin-Ho and Anderson-Toulouse-Chechetkin vortices. In a cigar shape trap spontaneous current flows longitudial to the rotation axis and thus perpendicular to the ordinary rotational current. These features, spontaneous mass current at rest and texture formation, can be used as diag…
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 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).
Superfluidity in fermionic systems originates from pairing of fermions, and Bose condensation of these so-called Cooper pairs. The Cooper pairs are usually made of fermions of different species; for example in superconductors they are pairs of electrons with opposite spins. Thus the most favorable situation for pairing and superfluidity is when the two species of fermions that form pairs have the same density. This paper studies the possible superfluid states when the two pairing species have different densities, and show that the resultant states have remarkable similarities to the phases of …
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 present a method to determine the critical rotational frequencies for superfluidity of both uniform and trapped Fermi gases across wide Feshbach resonance. It is found that as one approaches the resonance from the BCS side, beyond a critical scattering length, pairing is so robust that superfluidity cannot be destroyed by rotation. Moreover, the critical frequency has a sequence of jumps revealing the appearance of Landau levels, which are particularly prominent for systems up to a few thousand particles. For rotational frequency below an "ultimate" critical frequency, defined to be the low…
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 study a 1D Fermi gas with attractive short range-interactions in a disordered potential by the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) technique. This setting can be implemented experimentally by using cold atom techniques. We identify a region of parameters for which disorder enhances the superfluid state. As disorder is further increased, global superfluidity eventually breaks down. However this transition occurs before the transition to the insulator state takes place. This suggests the existence of an intermediate metallic `pseudogap' phase characterized by strong pairing but no qua…
We study the phase diagram of a three-component Fermi gas with weak attractive interactions, which shows three superfluid and one normal phases. At weak symmetry breaking between the components the existence of domain walls interpolating between two superfluids introduces a new length scale much larger than the coherence length of each superfluid. This, in particular, limits the applicability of the local density approximation in the trapped case, which we also discuss. In the same regime the system hosts soft collective modes with a mass much smaller than the energy gaps of individual superfl…
We investigate two-component ultracold fermionic atoms with repulsive interactions trapped in an optical lattice with a ladder structure. By applying the Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations to an effective t-J model in the strong correlation limit, we discuss how the spatially-modulated spin-singlet pairs with d-wave like symmetry are formed in the systems with trapping potentials. Furthermore, a close examination of the condensation energy as well as the local average of potential, kinetic and exchange energies by means of the variational Monte Carlo method elucidates that local particle correlati…
We demonstrate that a Weyl point, widely examined in 3D Weyl semimetals and superfluids, can develop a pair of non-degenerate gapless spheres. Such a bouquet of two spheres is characterized by three distinct topological invariants of manifolds with full energy gaps, i.e., the Chern number of a 0D point inside one developed sphere, the winding number of a 1D loop around the original Weyl point, and the Chern number of a 2D surface enclosing the whole bouquet. We show that such structured Weyl points can be realized in the superfluid quasiparticle spectrum of a 3D degenerate Fermi gas subject to…
Topological excitations are found throughout nature, in proteins and DNA, as dislocations in crystals, as vortices and solitons in superfluids and superconductors, and generally in the wake of symmetry-breaking phase transitions. In fermionic systems, topological defects may provide bound states for fermions that often play a crucial role for the system's transport properties. Famous examples are Andreev bound states inside vortex cores, fractionally charged solitons in relativistic quantum field theory, and the spinless charged solitons responsible for the high conductivity of polymers. Howev…
Fermionic functional renormalization group (FRG) is applied to describe the superfluid phase transition of the two-component fermionic system with attractive contact interaction. Connection between the fermionic FRG approach and the conventional Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) theory with Gorkov and Melik-Barkhudarov (GMB) correction are clarified in details in the weak coupling region by using the renormalization group flow of the fermionic four-point vertex with particle-particle and particle-hole scattering contributions. To go beyond the BCS+GMB theory, coupled FRG flow equations of the fe…
We study a balanced two-component system of ultracold fermions in one dimension with attractive interactions and subject to a spin-dependent optical lattice potential of opposite sign for the two components. We find states with different types of modulated pairing order parameters which are conceptually similar to pi-phases discussed for superconductor-ferromagnet heterostructures. Increasing the lattice depth induces sharp transitions between states of different parity. While the origin of the order parameter oscillations is similar to the FFLO phase for paired states with spin imbalance, the…
We study the BCS superfluid transition in a single-component fermionic gas of dipolar particles loaded in a tight bilayer trap, with the electric dipole moments polarized perpendicular to the layers. Based on the detailed analysis of the interlayer scattering, we calculate the critical temperature of the interlayer superfluid pairing transition when the layer separation is both smaller (dilute regime) and of the order or larger (dense regime) than the mean interparticle separation in each layer. Our calculations go beyond the standard BCS approach and include the many-body contributions result…
Fermionic functional renormalization group (FRG) is applied to describe the superfluid phase transition of the two-component fermionic system with attractive contact interaction. Connection between the fermionic FRG approach and the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) theory with its Gorkov and Melik-Barkhudarov (GMB) correction is made clear, and the FRG flow of the fermion self-energy is also studied to go beyond the BCS+GMB theory. The superfluid transition temperature and the associated chemical potential are calculated in the region of the negative scattering length using fermionic FRG.
Motivated by recent experiments in low-dimensional trapped fermionic superfluids, we study a quasi-one-dimensional (quasi-1D) superfluid with a population imbalance between two hyperfine states using an exact mean-field solution for the order parameter. When an effective "magnetic field" exceeds a critical value, the superfluid order parameter develops spatial inhomogeneity in the form of a soliton lattice. The soliton lattice generates a band of quasiparticle states inside the energy gap, which originate from the Andreev bound states localized at the solitons. Emergence of the soliton lattice…
In this work we investigate the general properties and the ground state of an asymmetrical dilute gas of cold fermionic atoms, formed by two particle species having different densities. We have show in a recent paper, that a mixed phase composed of normal and superfluid components is the energetically favored ground state of such a cold fermionic system. Here we extend the analysis and verify that in fact, the mixed phase is the preferred ground state of an asymmetrical superfluid in various situatiations. We predict that the mixed phase can serve as a way of detecting superfluidity and estima…
The recent experimental realization of spin-orbit coupling (SOC) for ultra-cold atoms opens a completely new avenue for exploring new quantum matter. In experiments, the SOC is implemented simultaneously with a Zeeman field. Such spin-orbit coupled Fermi gases are predicted to support Majorana fermions with non-Abelian exchange statistics in one dimension (1D). However, as shown in recent theory and experiments for 1D spin-imbalanced Fermi gases, the Zeeman field can lead to the long-sought Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) superfluids with non-zero momentum Cooper pairings, in contrast …
This thesis presents theoretical work in s- and p-wave resonantly paired Fermi gases at zero temperature. In the BEC regime of the wide-resonance s-wave BCS-BEC crossover, the chemical potential, speed of sound, condensate depletion, and ground state energy are computed. The quantities are calculated in a low density approximation. The bosonic scattering length is computed diagrammatically to be approximately 0.60a with a the fermionic scattering length, confirming a well-known result. The perturbative approach breaks down in the intermediate BCS-BEC crossover regime which is not investigated.…
The thermal field theory is applied to fermionic superfluids by doubling the degrees of freedom of the BCS theory. We construct the two-mode states and the corresponding Bogoliubov transformation to obtain the BCS thermal vacuum. The expectation values with respect to the BCS thermal vacuum produce the statistical average of the thermodynamic quantities. The BCS thermal vacuum allows a quantum-mechanical perturbation theory with the BCS theory serving as the unperturbed state. We evaluate the leading-order corrections to the order parameter and other physical quantities from the perturbation t…
We present a manifestly gauge invariant linear response theory for ultra-cold Fermi gases undergoing BCS-Bose-Einstein Condensation (BEC) crossover with pair fluctuation effect included, especially in the superfluid phase, by introducing an effective external electromagnetic (EM) field. For pure BCS-type superfluids, the gauge invariance of the linear response theory can be maintained by constructing a full external EM vertex by including the fluctuation of the order parameters in the same way as the the self-energy effect is included in the quasi-particle, therefore the Ward identity (WI) is …
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…
We study the stability of the paired fermionic p-wave superfluid made out of identical atoms all in the same hyperfine state close to a p-wave Feshbach resonance. First we reproduce known results concerning the lifetime of a 3D superfluid, in particular, we show that it decays at the same rate as its interaction energy, thus precluding its equilibration before it decays. Then we proceed to study its stability in case when the superfluid is confined to 2D by means of an optical harmonic potential. We find that the relative stability is somewhat improved in 2D in the BCS regime, such that the de…
We study the zero temperature non-equilibrium dynamics of a fermionic superfluid in the BCS limit and in the presence of a drive leading to a time dependent chemical potential $μ(t)$. We choose a periodic driving protocol characterized by a frequency $ω$ and compute the fermion density, the wavefunction overlap, and the residual energy of the system at the end of $N$ periods of the drive. We demonstrate that the BCS self-consistency condition is crucial in shaping the long-time behaviour of the fermions subjected to the drive and provide an analytical understanding of the behaviour of the ferm…