Spin-orbit coupling is an important ingredient in many recently discovered phenomena such as the spin-Hall effect and topological insulators. Of particular interest is topological superconductivity, with its potential application in topological quantum computation. The absence of disorder in ultra-cold atomic systems makes them ideal for quantum computation applications, however, the spin-orbit (SO) coupling schemes proposed thus far are experimentally impractical owing to large spontaneous emission rates in the alkali fermions. In this paper, we develop a scheme to generate Rashba SO coupling with a low spontaneous emission extension to a recent experiment. We show that this scheme generates a Fermi surface spin texture for $^{40}\rm{K}$ atoms, which is observable in time-of-flight measurements. The chiral spin texture, together with conventional $s$-wave interactions leads to topological superconductivity and non-Abelian Majorana quasiparticles.
We consider interacting ultracold fermions subject to Rashba spin-orbit coupling. We construct a single-branch interacting theory for the Fermi gas when the system is dilute enough so that the positive helicity branch is not occupied at all in the non-interacting ground state. We show that the theory is renormalizable in perturbation theory and therefore yields a model of polarized fermions that avoids a multi-channel treatment of the problem. Our results open the path towards a much more straightforward approach to the many-body physics of cold atoms subject to artificial vector potentials.
We investigate theoretically BEC-BCS crossover physics in the presence of a Rashba spin-orbit coupling in a system of two-component Fermi gas with and without a Zeeman field that breaks the population balance between the two components. A new bound state (Rashba pair) emerges because of the spin-orbit interaction. We study the properties of Rashba pairs using a standard pair fluctuation theory. At zero temperature, the Rashba pairs condense into a macroscopic mixed spin state. We discuss in detail the experimental signatures for observing the condensation of Rashba pairs by calculating various…
We theoretically study an interacting few-body system of Rashba spin-orbit coupled two-component Bose gases confined in a harmonic trapping potential. We solve the interacting Hamiltonian at large Rashba coupling strengths using Exact Diagonalization scheme, and obtain the ground state phase diagram for a range of interatomic interactions and particle numbers. At small particle numbers, we observe that the bosons condense to an array of topological states with n+1/2 quantum angular momentum vortex configurations, where n = 0, 1, 2, 3... At large particle numbers, we observe two distinct regime…
A Bose gas subject to a light-induced Rashba spin-orbit coupling possesses a dispersion minimum on a circle in momentum space; we show that kinematic constraints due to this dispersion cause interactions to renormalize to universal, angle-dependent values that govern the phase structure in the dilute-gas limit. We find that, regardless of microscopic interactions, (a) the ground state involves condensation at two opposite momenta, and is, in finite systems, a fragmented condensate; and (b) there is a nonzero-temperature instability toward the condensation of pairs of bosons. We discuss how our…
We study the Bose-Einstein condensate phase transition of three-dimensional ultracold bosons with isotropic Rashba spin-orbit coupling. Investigating the structure of Ginzburg-Landau free energy as a function of the condensate density, we show, within the Bogoliubov approximation, that the condensate phase transition is first order with a jump in the condensate density. We calculate the transition temperature and the jump in the condensate density at the transition for large spin-orbit coupling, where the transition temperature depends linearly on the density of particles. Finally, we discuss …
We investigate the new physics that arises when a correlated quantum impurity hybridizes with Fermi gas with a generalized Rashba spin-orbit coupling produced via a uniform synthetic non-Abelian gauge field. We show that the impurity develops a {\it fractional} local moment which couples anti-ferromagnetically to the Rashba-Fermi gas. This results in a concomitant {\it Kondo effect with a high temperature scale} that can be tuned by the strength of the Rashba spin-orbit coupling.
Fermi gases with generalized Rashba spin orbit coupling inducedby a synthetic gauge field have the potential of realizing many interesting states such as rashbon condensates and topological phases. Here we develop a fluctuation theory of such systems and demonstrate that beyond-Gaussian effects are essential to capture the physics of such systems. We obtain their phase diagram by constructing an approximate non-Gaussian theory. We conclusively establish that spin-orbit coupling can enhance the exponentially small transition temperature ($T_c$) of a weakly attracting superfluid to the order of …
Ground-state phase diagram of two-component Bose gases with Rashba spin-orbit coupling is determined via a variational approach. A phase in which the fully polarized condensate occupies zero momentum is identified. This zero-momentum phase competes with the spin density wave phase when interspecies interaction is stronger than intraspecies interaction, and the former one is always the ground state for weak spin-orbit coupling. When the energies of these two phases are close, there is a phase separation between them. At finite temperature, such a zero-momentum condensation can be induced by a f…
We study the BCS-Bose Einstein Condensation (BEC) crossover of a three dimensional spin polarized Fermi gas with Rashba spin-orbital-coupling (SOC). At finite temperature, the effects of non-condensed pairs due to the thermal excitation are considered based on the $G_0G$ pair fluctuation theory. These fluctuations generate a pseudogap even persistent above $T_c$. Within this framework, the Sarma state or the spin polarized superfluid state and polarized pseudogap state are explored in detail. The resulting $T_c$ curves show that the enhancement of pairing due to the SOC roughly cancels out the…
We consider the effect of a momentum kick on the ground state of a non-interacting two-dimensional Fermi gas subject to Rashba spin-orbit coupling. Although the total momentum is a constant of motion, the gas does not obey the rules of Galilean relativity. Upon imprinting a small overall velocity to the non-interacting gas, we find that the Fermi sea is deformed in a non-trivial way. We also consider a weakly repulsive Fermi gas, and find, from its Hartree shift, that the total ground state of the system may change into a deformed, finite momentum ground state as the repulsion is increased bey…
The striped state of ultracold bosons with Rashba spin-orbit coupling in a homogeneous infinite system has, as we show, a constant particle flow, which in a finite-size system would accumulate particles at the boundaries; it is thus not a physical steady state of the system. We propose, as a variational ansatz, a condensate wave function for a weakly trapped system which behaves similarly to the striped state near the center, but does not have particle flow at the boundaries. This state has a line of unquantized coreless vortices. We show, by minimizing the total energy, that our modified stri…
We theoretically investigate the inhomogeneous Fulde-Ferrell (FF) superfluidity in a three dimensional atomic Fermi gas with Rashba spin-orbit coupling near a broad Feshbach resonance. We show that within mean-field theory the FF superfluid state is always more favorable than the standard Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superfluid state when an in-plane Zeeman field is applied. We present a qualitative finite-temperature phase diagram near resonance and argue that the predicted FF superfluid is observable with experimentally attainable temperatures (i.e., $T\sim0.2T_{F}$, where $T_{F}$ is the …
We use the Bogoliubov-de Gennes formalism to analyze harmonically trapped Fermi gases with Rashba-type spin-orbit coupling in two dimensions. We consider both population-balanced and -imbalanced Fermi gases throughout the BCS-BEC evolution, and study the effects of spin-orbit coupling on the spontaneously induced countercirculating mass currents and the associated intrinsic angular momentum. In particular, we find that even a small spin-orbit coupling destabilizes Fulde-Ferrel-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO)-type spatially modulated superfluid phases as well as the phase-separated states against the…
We investigate the Gorkov--Melik-Barkhudarov (GM) correction to superfluid transition temperature in two-dimensional Fermi gases with Rashba spin-orbit coupling (SOC) across the SOC-driven BCS-BEC crossover. In the calculation of the induced interaction, we find that the spin-component mixing due to SOC can induce both of the conventional screening and additional antiscreening contributions that interplay significantly in the strong SOC regime. While the GM correction generally lowers the estimate of transition temperature, it turns out that at a fixed weak interaction, the correction effect e…
We present a systematic theoretical study of the BCS-BEC crossover in two-dimensional Fermi gases with Rashba spin-orbit coupling (SOC). By solving the exact two-body problem in the presence of an attractive short-range interaction we show that the SOC enhances the formation of the bound state: the binding energy $E_{\text B}$ and effective mass $m_{\text B}$ of the bound state grows along with the increase of the SOC. For the many-body problem, even at weak attraction, a dilute Fermi gas can evolve from a BCS superfluid state to a Bose condensation of molecules when the SOC becomes comparable…
We present a theoretical study of the superfluidity and the corresponding collective modes in two-component atomic Fermi gases with s-wave attraction and synthetic Rashba spin-orbit coupling. The general effective action for the collective modes is derived from the functional path integral formalism. By tuning the spin-orbit coupling from weak to strong, the system undergoes a crossover from an ordinary BCS/BEC superfluid to a Bose-Einstein condensate of rashbons. We show that the properties of the superfluid density and the Anderson-Bogoliubov mode manifest this crossover. At large spin-orbit…
We investigate theoretically radio-frequency spectroscopy of weakly bound molecules in an ultracold spin-orbit-coupled atomic Fermi gas. We consider two cases with either equal Rashba and Dresselhaus coupling or pure Rashba coupling. The former system has been realized very recently at Shanxi University [Wang et al., arXiv:1204.1887] and MIT [Cheuk et al., arXiv:1205.3483]. We predict realistic radio-frequency signals for revealing the unique properties of anisotropic molecules formed by spin-orbit coupling.
We study pairing formation and the appearance of induced spin-triplet p-wave superfluidity in dilute three-dimensional imbalanced Fermi gases in the presence of a uniform non-Abelian gauge field. This gauge field generates a synthetic Rashba-type spin-orbit interaction which has remarkable consequences in the induced p-wave pairing gaps. Without the synthetic gauge field, the p-wave pairing occurs in one of the components due to the induced (second-order) interaction via an exchange of density fluctuations in the other component. We show that this p-wave superfluid gap induced by density fluct…
Fundamental properties of superfluids with d-wave pairing symmetry are investigated theoretically. We consider neutral atomic Fermi gases in a harmonic trap, the Cooper pairing being produced by a Feshbach resonance via a d-wave interaction channel. A Ginzburg-Landau (GL) functional is constructed which is symmetry constrained for five component order parameters (OPs). We find stable OP textures and vortices for all the three phases which are known to be the energy minimum of the GL functional; the ferromagnetic, polar and cyclic phases both at rest and under rotation. In particular, we touch …
Supersolid is a long-sought exotic phase of matter, which is characterized by the coexistence of a diagonal long-range order of solid and an off-diagonal long-range order of superfluid. Possible candidates to realize such a phase have been previously considered, including hard-core bosons with long-range interaction and soft-core bosons. Here we demonstrate that an ultracold atomic condensate of hard-core bosons with contact interaction can establish a supersolid phase when simultaneously subjected to spin-orbit coupling and a spin-dependent periodic potential. This supersolid phase is accompa…
We derive expressions for spin and density correlation functions in the (greatly enhanced) pseudogap phase of spin-orbit coupled Fermi superfluids. Density-density correlation functions are found to be relatively insensitive to the presence of these Rashba effects. To arrive at spin-spin correlation functions we derive new $f$-sum rules, valid even in the absence of a spin conservation law. Our spin-spin correlation functions are shown to be fully consistent with these $f$-sum rules. Importantly, they provide a clear signature of the Rashba band-structure and separately help to establish the p…
We investigate normal state properties of spin-orbit coupled Fermi gases with repulsive s-wave interaction, in the absence of molecule formation, i.e., in the so-called "upper branch". Within the framework of random phase approximation, we derive analytical expressions for the quasi-particle lifetime $τ_s$, the effective mass $m_s^*$, and the Green's function renormalization factor $Z_s$ in the presence of Rashba spin-orbit coupling. In contrast to spin-orbit coupled electron gas with Coulomb interaction, we show that the modifications are dependent on the Rashba band index s, and occur in the…
We investigate the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) transition in a two-dimensional (2D) Fermi gas with spin-orbit coupling (SOC), as a function of the two-body binding energy and a perpendicular Zeeman field. By including a generic form of the SOC, as a function of Rashba and Dresselhaus terms, we study the evolution between the experimentally relevant equal Rashba-Dresselhaus (ERD) case and the Rashba-only (RO) case. We show that in the ERD case, at fixed non-zero Zeeman field, the BKT transition temperature $T_{BKT}$ is increased by the effect of SOC for all values of the binding energ…
We theoretically investigate a three-dimensional Fermi gas with Rashba spin-orbit coupling in the presence of both out-of-plane and in-plane Zeeman fields. We show that, driven by a sufficiently large Zeeman field, either out-of-plane or in-plane, the superfluid phase of this system exhibits a number of interesting features, including inhomogeneous Fulde-Ferrell pairing, gapped or gapless topological order and exotic quasi-particle excitations known as Weyl fermions that have linear energy dispersions in momentum space (i.e., massless Dirac fermions). The topological superfluid phase can have …
The effects of Rashba spin-orbit coupling on BCS-BEC crossover, the condensate fraction and pair coherence lengths for a two-component attractive Fermi gas in two dimension are studied. The results at $T=0K$ indicate that (1) when the strength of SOC is beyond a critical value, BCS-BEC crossover does not happen in a conventional sense; (2) SOC enhances the condensate fraction, but suppresses pair coherence lengths.
The realization of spin-orbit coupling (SOC) in ultracold atoms has triggered an intensive exploring of topological superfluids in the degenerate Fermi gases based on mean-field theory, which has not yet been reported in experiments. Here, we demonstrate the topological phase transitions in the system via the numerically exact quantum Monte Carlo method. Without prior assumptions, our unbiased real-space calculation shows that spin-orbit coupling can stabilize an unconventional pairing in the weak SOC regime, in which the Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov pairing coexists with the Bardeen-Coope…
The stability of an unpolarized two-component dipolar Fermi gas is studied within mean-field theory. Besides the known instability towards spontaneous magnetization with Fermi sphere deformation, another instability towards spontaneous formation of a spin-orbit coupled phase with a Rashba-like spin texture is found. A phase diagram is presented and consequences are briefly discussed.
Recent experimental realization of one-dimensional (1D) spin-orbit coupling (SOC) for ultracold alkaline-earth(-like) atoms in optical lattice clocks opens a new avenue for exploring exotic quantum matter because of the strongly suppressed heating of atoms from lasers comparing with alkaline atoms. Here we propose a scheme to realize two-dimensional (2D) Rashba and three-dimensional (3D) Weyl types of SOC in a 3D optical lattice clock and explore their topological phases. With 3D Weyl SOC, the system can support topological phases with various numbers as well as types (I or II) of Weyl points.…
The recent experimental realization of spin-orbit coupled Fermi gases provides a unique opportunity to study the interplay between strong interaction and SOC in a tunable, disorder-free system. We present here precision ab initio numerical results on the two-dimensional, unpolarized, uniform Fermi gas with attractive interactions and Rashba SOC. Using auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo and incorporating recent algorithmic advances, we carry out exact calculations on sufficiently large system sizes to provide accurate results systematically as a function of experimental parameters. We obtain t…
We study the ground-state configurations and spin textures of rotating two-component Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) with Rashba-Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling (RD-SOC), which are confined in a two-dimensional (2D) optical lattice plus a 2D harmonic trap. In the absence of rotation, a relatively small isotropic 2D RD-SOC leads to the generation of ghost vortices for initially miscible BECs, while it gives rise to the creation of rectangular vortex-antivortex lattices for initially immiscible BECs. As the strength of the 2D RD-SOC enhances, the visible vortices or the 2D vortex-antivortex cha…
Pairing in an attractively interacting two-component Fermi gas in the absence of the inversion symmetry and/or the time-reversal symmetry may give rise to exotic superfluid states. Notable examples range from the Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) state with a finite center-of-mass momentum in a polarized Fermi gas, to the topological superfluid state in a two-dimensional Fermi gas under Rashba spin-orbit coupling and an out-of-plane Zeeman field. Here, we show that a topological FFLO state can be stabilized in a two-dimensional Fermi gas with Rashba spin-orbit coupling and both in-plane …
By adopting a $T$-matrix-based method within the $G_0G$ approximation for the pair susceptibility, we study the effects of the pairing fluctuation on the three-dimensional spin-orbit coupled Fermi gases at finite temperature. The critical temperatures of the superfluid/normal phase transition are determined for three different types of spin-orbit coupling (SOC): (1) the extreme oblate (EO) or Rashba SOC, (2) the extreme prolate (EP) or equal Rashba-Dresselhaus SOC, and (3) the spherical (S) SOC. For EO- and S-type SOC, the SOC dependence of the critical temperature signals a crossover from BCS…
We have solved numerically the ground states of a Bose-Einstein condensate in the presence of dipolar interparticle forces using a semiclassical approach. Our motivation is to model, in particular, the spontaneous spin textures emerging in quantum gases with large dipole moments, such as 52Cr or Dy condensates, or ultracold gases consisting of polar molecules. For a pancake-shaped harmonic (optical) potential, we present the ground state phase diagram spanned by the strength of the nonlinear coupling and dipolar interactions. In an elongated harmonic potential, we observe a novel helical spin …
We consider the time evolution of the magnetization in a Rashba spin-orbit-coupled Fermi gas, starting from a fully-polarized initial state. We model the dynamics using a Boltzmann equation, which we solve in the Hartree-Fock approximation. The resulting non-linear system of equations gives rise to three distinct dynamical regimes with qualitatively different asymptotic behaviors of the magnetization at long times. The distinct regimes and the transitions between them are controlled by the interaction strength: for weakly interacting fermions, the magnetization decays to zero. For intermediate…
We report on fundamental properties of superfluids with d-wave pairing symmetry. We consider neutral atomic Fermi gases in a harmonic trap, the pairing being produced by a Feshbach resonance via a d-wave interaction channel. A Ginzburg-Landau (GL) functional is constructed which is symmetry constrained for five component order parameters (OP). We find OP textures in the cyclic phase and stability conditions for a non-Abelian fractional 1/3-vortex under rotation. It is proposed how to create the intriguing 1/3-vortex experimentally in atomic gases via optical means.
Variational wavefunctions that introduce zeros (vortices) to screen repulsive interactions are typically difficult to verify in unbiased microscopic calculations. An approach is constructed to insert vortices into ansatz wavefunctions using a matrix product representation. This approach opens the door to validation of a broad class of Jastrow-based wavefunctions. The formalism is applied to a model motivated by experiments on ultracold atomic gases in the presence of synthetic spin-orbit coupling. Validated wavefunctions show that vortices in atomic Fermi gases with flat Rashba spin-orbit band…
We study the interplay between the Zeeman field and spin-orbit coupling (SOC) in harmonically trapped Fermi gases loaded into a two-dimensional single-band tight-binding optical lattice. Using the Bogoliubov-de Gennes theory, we find that the Zeeman field combined with a Rashba SOC gives rise to $(i)$ Fulde-Ferrell-like superfluidity and $(ii)$ skyrmion-like polarization textures near the edges of the system. We also discussed the effects of interaction, temperature, SOC anisotropy and Zeeman field anisotropy on the superfluid ground state and polarization textures.
We use the mean-field theory to analyze the ground-state phase diagrams of spin-orbit coupled mass-imbalanced Fermi gases throughout the BCS-BEC evolution, including both the population-balanced and -imbalanced systems. Our calculations show that the competition between the mass and population imbalance and the Rashba-type spin-orbit coupling (SOC) gives rise to very rich phase diagrams, involving normal, superfluid and phase separated regions. In addition, we find quantum phase transitions between the topologically trivial gapped superfluid and the nontrivial gapless superfluid phases, openin…
