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 resulting in the mass renormalization, as well as additional contributions to the pairing interaction. We find that the many-body effects have a pronounced effect on the critical temperature, and can either decrease (in the very dilute limit) or increase (in the dense and moderately dilute limits) the transition temperature as compared to the BCS approach.
We study superfluidity of strongly repulsive fermionic atoms in optical lattices. The atoms are paired up through a correlated tunneling mechanism, which induces superfluidity when repulsive nearest-neighbor interactions are included in the Hubbard model. This paired superfluid is a metastable state which persists for a long time as the pair-broken process is severely suppressed. The mean-field phase diagram and low energy excitations are investigated in a square lattice system. Intriguingly, spontaneous superflows may appear in the ground state of a triangular optical lattice system due to an…
Exciton bound states in solids between electrons and holes are predicted to form a superfluid at high temperatures. We show that by employing atomically thin crystals such as a pair of adjacent bilayer graphene sheets, equilibrium superfluidity of electron-hole pairs should be achievable for the first time. The transition temperatures are well above liquid helium temperatures. Because the sample parameters needed for the device have already been attained in similar graphene devices, our work suggests a new route towards realizing high-temperature superfluidity in existing quality graphene samp…
Larkin-Ovchinnikov (LO) state which combines the superfluidity and spatial periodicity of pairing order parameter and exhibits the supersolid properties has been attracting intense attention in both condensed matter physics and ultracold atoms. Conventionally, realization of LO state from an intrinsic s-wave interacting system necessitates to break the time-reversal (TR) and sometimes spatial-inversion (SI) symmetries. Here we report a novel prediction that the LO state can be realized in a TR and SI symmetric system representing a bilayer Fermi gas subjected to a laserassisted interlayer tunn…
Cavity QED experiments are natural hosts for non-equilibrium phases of matter supported by photon-mediated interactions. In this work, we consider a cavity QED simulation of the BCS model of superfluidity, by studying regimes where the cavity photons act as dynamical degrees of freedom instead of mere mediators of the interaction via virtual processes. We find an enhancement of long time coherence following a quench whenever the cavity frequency is tuned into resonance with the atoms. We discuss how this is equivalent to enhancement of non-equilibrium superfluidity and highlight similarities t…
We consider fermionic polar molecules in a bilayer geometry where they are oriented perpendicularly to the layers, which permits both low inelastic losses and superfluid pairing. The dipole-dipole interaction between molecules of different layers leads to the emergence of interlayer superfluids. The superfluid regimes range from BCS-like fermionic superfluidity with a high $T_c$ to Bose-Einstein (quasi-)condensation of interlayer dimers, thus exhibiting a peculiar BCS-BEC crossover. We show that one can cover the entire crossover regime under current experimental conditions.
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 study the zero temperature phase diagram of an imbalanced bilayer of dipolar fermions. We consider perpendicularly aligned identical dipoles in two layers and investigate the effect of population imbalance on the ground state phase at different layer spacings and average densities. The attractive part of the interlayer interaction could lead to the BEC-BCS crossover and the Fermi surface mismatch between two layers results in interesting uniform and nonuniform superfluid phases, which we have investigated here using the BCS mean-field theory together with the superfluid-mass density criteri…
Superfluidity in e-h bilayers in graphene and GaAs has been predicted many times but not observed. A key problem is how to treat the screening of the Coulomb interaction for pairing. Different mean-field theories give dramatically different conclusions, and we test them against diffusion Monte-Carlo calculations. We get excellent agreement with the mean-field theory that uses screening in the superfluid state, but large discrepancies with the others. The theory predicts no superfluidity in existing devices and gives pointers for new devices to generate superfluidity.
Understanding the interplay between magnetism and superconductivity is one of the central issues in condensed matter physics. Such interplay induced nodal structure of superconducting gap is widely believed to be a signature of exotic pairing mechanism (not phonon mediated) to achieve unconventional superconductivity, such as in heavy fermion, high $T_c$, and organic superconductors. Here we report a new mechanism to drive the interplay between magnetism and superfluidity via the spatially anisotropic interaction. This scheme frees up the usual requirement of suppressing long-range magnetic or…
We use cluster dynamical mean field theory to study the phase diagram of the square lattice bilayer Hubbard model with an interlayer interaction. The layers are populated by two-component fermions, and the densities in both layers and the strength of the interactions are varied. We find that an attractive interlayer interaction can induce a checkerboard density ordered phase and superfluid phases, with either interlayer or intralayer pairing. Remarkably, the latter phase does not require an intralayer interaction to be present: it can be attributed to an induced attractive interaction caused b…
Motivated by recent experimental advances in ultracold atoms, we analyze a non-Hermitian (NH) BCS Hamiltonian with a complex-valued interaction arising from inelastic scattering between fermions. We develop a mean-field theory to obtain a NH gap equation for order parameters, which are different from the standard BCS ones due to the inequivalence of left and right eigenstates in the NH physics. We find unconventional phase transitions unique to NH systems: superfluidity shows reentrant behavior with increasing dissipation, as a consequence of non-diagonalizable exceptional points, lines, and s…
We propose a model for addressing the superfluidity of two different Fermi species confined in a bilayer geometry of square optical lattices. The fermions are assumed to be molecules with interlayer s-wave interactions, whose dipole moments are oriented perpendicularly to the layers. Using functional integral techniques we investigate the BCS-like state induced in the bilayer at finite temperatures. In particular, we determine the critical temperature as a function of the coupling strength between molecules in different layers and of the interlayer spacing. By means of Ginzburg-Landau theory w…
Topological superfluid, new quantum matter that possesses gapless exotic excitations known as Majorana fermions, has attracted extensive attention recently. These excitations, which can encode topological qubits, could be crucial ingredients for fault-tolerant quantum computation. However, creating and manipulating multiple Majorana fermions remain an ongoing challenge. Loading a topologically protected system in multi-layer structures would be a natural and simple way to achieve this goal. Here we investigate the system of bilayer Fermi gases with spin-orbit coupling and show that the topolog…
Recently a scheme has been proposed for generating the 2D Rashba-type spin-orbit coupling (SOC) for ultracold atomic bosons in a bilayer geometry [S.-W. Su et al, Phys. Rev. A \textbf{93}, 053630 (2016)]. Here we investigate the superfluidity properties of a degenerate Fermi gas affected by the SOC in such a bilayer system. We demonstrate that a Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) state appears in the regime of small to moderate atom-light coupling. In contrast to the ordinary SOC, the FFLO state emerges in the bilayer system without adding any external fields or spin polarization. As the …
We present a pairing fluctuation theory which self-consistently incorporates finite momentum pair excitations in the context of BCS--Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) crossover, and we apply this theory to high $T_c$ superconductors and ultracold Fermi gases. There are strong similarities between Fermi gases in the unitary regime and high Tc superconductors. Here we address key issues of common interest, especially the pseudogap. In the Fermi gases we summarize recent experiments including various phase diagrams (with and without population imbalance), as well as evidence for a pseudogap in the…
Quantum degenerate cold-atom gases provide a remarkable opportunity to study strongly interacting systems. Recent experimental progress in producing ultracold polar molecules with a net electric dipole moment opens up new possibilities to realize novel quantum phases governed by the long-range and anisotropic dipole-dipole interactions. In this work we predict the existence of experimentally observable novel broken-symmetry states with spontaneous interlayer coherence in cold polar molecules. These exotic states appear due to strong repulsive interlayer interactions and exhibit properties of s…
Recent groundbreaking experiments studying the effects of spin polarization on pairing in unitary Fermi gases encountered mutual qualitative and quantitative discrepancies which seem to be a function of the confining geometry. Using novel numerical algorithms we study the solution space for a 3-dimensional fully self-consistent formulation of realistic systems with up to $10^{5}$ atoms. A study of the three types of solutions obtained demonstrates a tendency towards metastability as the confining geometry is elongated. One of these solutions, which is consistent with Rice experiments at high t…
We consider the ground state of a bilayer system of dipolar bosons, where dipoles are oriented by an external field in the direction perpendicular to the parallel planes. Quantum Monte Carlo methods are used to calculate the ground-state energy, the one-body and two-body density matrix, and the superfluid response as a function of the separation between layers. We find that by decreasing the interlayer distance for fixed value of the strength of the dipolar interaction, the system undergoes a quantum phase transition from a single-particle to a pair superfluid. The single-particle superfluid i…
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…
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.
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…
From flow without dissipation of energy to the formation of vortices when placed within a rotating container, the superfluid state of matter has proven to be a very interesting physical phenomenon. Here we present the key mechanisms behind superfluidity in fermionic systems and apply our understanding to an exotic system found deep within the universe -- the superfluid found deep within a neutron star. A defining trait of a superfluid is the pairing gap, which the cooling curves of neutron stars depend on. The extreme conditions surrounding a neutron star prevent us from directly probing the s…
A two-component two-dimensional (2D) dipolar bosonic system in the bilayer geometry is considered. By performing quantum Monte Carlo simulations in a wide range of layer spacings we analyze in detail the pair correlation functions, the static response function, the kinetic and interaction energies. By reducing the layer spacing we observe a transition from weakly to strongly bound dimer states. The transition is accompanied by the onset of short-range correlations, suppression of the superfluid response, and rotonization of the excitation spectrum. A dispersion law and a dynamic structure fact…
By using a well established 'ab initio' theoretical approach developed in the past to quantitatively study the superconductivity of condensed matter systems, which is based on the Kohn-Sham Density Functional theory, I study the superfluid properties and the BCS-BEC crossover of two parallel bi-dimensional layers of fermionic dipolar molecules, where the pairing mechanism leading to superfluidity is provided by the inter-layer coupling between dipoles. The finite temperature superfluid properties of both the homogeneous system and one were the fermions in each layer are confined by a square op…
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…
Pairing between fermions that attract each other, reveal itself to the macroscopic world in the form of superfluidity. Since the discovery of fermionic superfluidity, intense search has been going on to find various unconventional forms of fermion pairing as well as to increase the transition temperature. Here, we show that a two dimensional mixture of single-component fermions and dipolar bosons allows to reach experimentally feasible superfluid transition temperatures for non-standard pairing symmetries. Excitations in these superfluids are anyonic and their statistics depends on the order o…
We propose an ultracold-atom setting where a fermionic superfluidity with attractive s-wave interaction is uploaded in a non-Hermitian Lieb optical lattice. The existence of a real-energy flat band solution is revealed. We show that the interplay between the skin effect and flat-band localization leads to exotic localization properties. We develop a multiband mean-field description of this system and use both order parameters and superfluid weight to describe the phase transition. A relation between the superfluid weight and non-Hermitian quantum metric of the quantum states manifold is built.…
We study the superfluid pairing in a two-species gas of heteronuclear fermionic molecules with equal density. The interplay of the isotropic s-wave interaction and anisotropic long-range dipolar interaction reveals rich physics. We find that the single-particle momentum distribution has a characteristic ellipsoidal shape that can be reasonably represented by a deformation parameter $α$ defined similarly to the normal phase. Interesting momentum-dependent features of the order parameter are identified. We calculate the critical temperatures of both the singlet and triplet superfluid, suggesting…
We study finite-temperature properties of a two-dimensional superfluid made of ultracold alkali-metal atoms in the BCS-BEC crossover. We investigate the region below the critical temperature $T_{BKT}$ of the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless phase transition, where there is quasi-condensation, by analyzing the effects of phase and amplitude fluctuations of the order parameter. In particular, we calculate the superfluid fraction, the sound velocity and the quasi-condensate fraction as a function of the temperature and of the binding energy of fermionic pairs.
We study a system of ultracold fermionic Potassium (40K) atoms in a three-dimensional optical lattice in the vicinity of an s-wave Feshbach resonance. Close to resonance, the system is described by a multi-band Bose-Fermi Hubbard Hamiltonian. We derive an effective lowest-band Hamiltonian in which the effect of the higher bands is incorporated by a self-consistent mean-field approximation. The resulting model is solved by means of Generalized Dynamical Mean-Field Theory. In addition to the BEC/BCS crossover we find a phase transition to a fermionic Mott insulator at half filling, induced by th…
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 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 …
Trimer superfluidity of antiparallel dipolar excitons in a bilayer heterostructure
Racah Institute of Physics, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem（拉卡物理研究所，耶路撒冷希伯来大学）；The Fritz Haber Research Center for Molecular Dynamics, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem（弗里茨·哈伯分子动力学研究中心，耶路撒冷希伯来大学）
We investigate the spin-polarized chain of ultracold fermionic atoms with spin-3/2 described by the fermionic Hubbard model with SU(4) symmetric attractive interaction. The competition of bound pairs, trions, quartets and unbound atoms is studied analytically and by density matrix renormalization group simulations. We find several distinct states where bound particles coexist with the ferromagnetic state of unpaired fermions. In particular, an exotic inhomogeneous Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO)-type superfluid of quartets in a magnetic background of uncorrelated atoms is found for wea…
We analyze the finite-temperature phase diagram of the boson-fermion-Hubbard model with Feshbach converting interaction, using the coherent-state path-integral method. We show that depending on the position of the bosonic band, this type of interaction, even if weak, can drive the system into the resonant superfluid phase in the strong bosonic interaction limit. It turns out that this phase can exist for an arbitrary number of fermions (i.e., fermionic concentration between 0 and 2) but with the bosonic particle number very close to an integer value. We point out that the standard time-of-flig…
We investigate the quantum and thermal phase diagram of fermionic polar molecules loaded in a bilayer trapping potential with perpendicular dipole moment. We use both a BCS theory approach that is most realiable at weak-coupling and a strong-coupling approach that considers the two-body bound dimer states with one molecules in each layer as the relevant degree of freedom. The system ground state is a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of dimer bound states in the low density limit and a paired superfluid (BCS) state in the high density limit. At zero temperature, the intralayer repulsion is found …
Weyl superconductivity or superfluidity, a fascinating topological state of matter, features novel phenomena such as emergent Weyl fermionic excitations and anomalies. Here we report that an anisotropic Weyl superfluid state can arise as a low temperature stable phase in a 3D dipolar Fermi gas. A crucial ingredient of our model is a rotating external field that generates a direction-dependent two-body effective attraction. Experimental signatures are predicted for cold gases in radio-frequency spectroscopy. The finite temperature phase diagram of this system is studied and the transition tempe…
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…
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…
The p-wave superfluid is characterized by nontrivial topological characteristics essential for fault-tolerant quantum state manipulation. However, the practical realization of the p-wave state remains a challenging problem. We study the s- and p-wave superfluidity in mixtures of fermionic and spinor bosonic gases and derive a general set of the gap equations for these superfluid states. Numerically solving the gap equations for the s-wave state, we quantify the physical conditions for the realization of the pure p-wave state in a well-controlled environment of atomic physics in the absence of …
Understanding how strongly correlated two-dimensional (2D) systems can give rise to unconventional superconductivity with high critical temperatures is one of the major unsolved problems in condensed matter physics. Ultracold 2D Fermi gases have emerged as clean and controllable model systems to study the interplay of strong correlations and reduced dimensionality, but direct evidence of superfluidity in these systems has been missing. Here, we demonstrate superfluidity in an ultracold 2D Fermi gas by moving a periodic potential through the system and observing no dissipation below a critical …
Fermionic superfluidity in atomic Fermi gases across a Feshbach resonance is normally described by the atom-molecule theory, which treats the closed channel as a noninteracting point boson. In this work we present a theoretical description of the resonant superfluidity in analogy to the two-band superconductors. We employ the underlying two-channel scattering model of Feshbach resonance where the closed channel is treated as a composite boson with binding energy $\varepsilon_0$ and the resonance is triggered by the microscopic interchannel coupling $U_{12}$. The binding energy $\varepsilon_0$ …
Layered bosonic dipolar fluids have been suggested to host a condensate of interlayer molecular bound states. However, its experimental observation has remained elusive. Motivated by two recent experimental works [Hubert et al., Phys. Rev. X 9, 021026 (2019) and D. J. Choksy et al., Phys. Rev. B 103 045126 (2021)], we theoretically study, using numerically exact quantum Monte Carlo calculations, the experimental signatures of collective interlayer pairing in vertically stacked indirect exciton (IX) layers. We find that IX energy shifts associated with each layer evolve non trivially as a funct…
Motivated by recent experimental advances in creating polar molecular gases in the laboratory, we theoretically investigate the many body effects of two-dimensional dipolar systems with the anisotropic and $1/r^3$ dipole-dipole interactions. We calculate collective modes of 2D dipolar systems, and also consider spatially separated bilayer and multilayer superlattice dipolar systems. We obtain the characteristic features of collective modes in quantum dipolar gases. We quantitatively compare the modes of these dipolar systems with the modes of the extensively studied usual two-dimensional elect…
We consider a bilayer setup with two parallel planes of cold fermionic polar molecules when the dipole moments are oriented perpendicular to the planes. The binding energy of two-body states with one polar molecule in each layer is determined and compared to various analytic approximation schemes in both coordinate- and momentum-space. The effective interaction of two bound dimers is obtained by integrating out the internal dimer bound state wave function and its robustness under analytical approximations is studied. Furthermore, we consider the effect of the background of other fermions on th…
A superfluid-insulator transition is known to occur in strongly disordered Fermi gases, in both the BCS and BEC regimes; here, we address the properties of this transition across the BEC-BCS crossover. We argue that the critical disorder strength at which superfluidity is lost changes non-monotonically with detuning from Feshbach resonance, and that a reentrant superfluid phase arises for detunings near the fermionic mobility edge. Our analysis of the intermediate regime is quantitatively valid for narrow resonances and near four dimensions, and provides a simple physical picture of this regim…
It is well-known that when the magnetic field is stronger than a critical value, the spin imbalance can break the Cooper pairs of electrons and hence hinder the superconductivity in a spin-singlet channel. In a bilayer system of ultra-cold Fermi gases, however, we demonstrate that the critical value of the magnetic field at zero temperature can be significantly increased by including a spin-flip tunnelling, which opens a gap in the spin-triplet channel near the Fermi surface and hence reduces the influence of the effective magnetic field on the superfluidity. The phase transition also changes …
We reveal that the p-wave superfluid can be realized in a mixture of fermionic and F=1 bosonic gases. We derive a general set of the gap equations for gaps in the s- and p-channels. It is found that the spin-spin bose-fermi interactions favor the p-wave pairing and naturally suppress the pairing in the s-channel. The gap equations for the polar phase of p-wave superfluid fermions are numerically solved. It is shown that a pure p-wave superfluid can be observed in a well-controlled environment of atomic physics.
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…
Topological superfluids are of technological relevance since they are believed to host Majorana bound states, a powerful resource for quantum computation and memory. Here we propose to realize topological superfluidity with fermionic atoms in an optical lattice. We consider a situation where atoms in two internal states experience different lattice potentials: one species is localized and the other itinerant, and show how quantum fluctuations of the localized fermions give rise to an attraction and strong spin-orbit coupling in the itinerant band. At low temperature, these effects stabilize a …
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 study translation-invariant quasi-free states for a system of fermions with two-particle interactions. The associated energy functional is similar to the BCS functional but includes also direct and exchange energies. We show that for suitable short-range interactions, these latter terms only lead to a renormalization of the chemical potential, with the usual properties of the BCS functional left unchanged. Our analysis thus represents a rigorous justification of part of the BCS approximation. We give bounds on the critical temperature below which the system displays superfluidity.
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…
