The recent experimental realization of spin-orbit (SO) coupling for ultracold bosons and fermions opens an exciting avenue for engineering quantum matter that may be challenging to realize in solid state materials such as SO coupled spin-1 fermions. While one-dimensional SO coupling for spin-1 bosons has been experimentally realized, the generation of two-dimensional (2D) SO coupling and its topological properties are largely unexplored. Here we propose an experimental scheme for realizing a 2D Dresselhaus-type SO coupling in a square lattice for spin-1 Fermi gases. Because of the extended spin degree of freedom, many interesting topological phases could exist without relying on lattice point group symmetries that are crucial in solid state materials. These exotic phases include triply-degenerate points, quadratic band touching, a large Chern number ($C=5$) superfluid with 5 Majorana modes, triple-Weyl fermions, etc. Our scheme can be generalized to larger spins and provides a new route for engineering topological quantum matter by utilizing large spin degrees of freedom, instead of specific lattice symmetries.
We consider the ground state of a mixture of two pseudospin-$\1/2$ Bose gases with interspecies spin exchange in a trapping potential. In the mean field approach, the ground state can be described in terms of four wave functions governed by a set of coupled Gross-Pitaevskii-like (GP-like) equations, which differ from the usual GP equations in the existence of an interference term due to spin-exchange coupling between the two species. Using these GP-like equations, we calculate such ground state properties as chemical potentials, density profiles and spin density profiles, which are directly ob…
We develop a low energy effective field theory of a mixture of two species of pseudospin-1/2 atoms with interspecies spin-exchange, in addition to density-density interaction. This approach is beyond the single orbital-mode approximation. In a wide parameter regime, it indicates the existence of the four elementary excitations, especially a gapped mode due to interspecies spin-exchange. On the other hand, the spectrum of the effective spin Hamiltonian yielded by the single mode approximation can be obtained by quantizing the homogeneous excitation, which is spin excitation and is the long-wave…
We consider the effective spin Hamiltonian describing a mixture of two species of pseudo-spin-1/2 Bose gases with interspecies spin exchange. First we analyze the stability of the fixed points of the corresponding classical dynamics, of which the signature is found in quantum dynamics with a disentangled initial state. Focusing on the case without an external potential, we find all the ground states by taking into account quantum fluctuations around the classical ground state in each parameter regime. The nature of entanglement and its relation with classical bifurcation is investigated. When …
Several lattices, such as the dice or the Lieb lattice, possess Dirac cones and a flat band crossing the Dirac point, whose effective model is the pseudospin-1 Dirac-Weyl equation. We investigate the fate of the flat band in the presence of disorder by focusing on the density of states (DOS) and dc conductivity. While the central hub-site does not reveal the presence of the flat band, the sublattice resolved DOS on the non-central sites exhibits a narrow peak with height ~ 1/\sqrt{g} with g the dimensionless disorder variance. Although the group velocity is zero on the flat band, the dc conduc…
Using the approach of low-energy effective field theory, the phase diagram is studied for a mixture of two species of pseudospin-$\1/2$ Bose atoms with interspecies spin-exchange. There are four mean-field regimes on the parameter plane of $g_e$ and $g_z$, where $g_e$ is the interspecies spin-exchange interaction strength, while $g_z$ is the difference between the interaction strength of interspecies scattering without spin-exchange of equal spins and that of unequal spins. Two regimes, with $|g_z| > |g_e|$, correspond to ground states with the total spins of the two species parallel or antipa…
We study the rotational (yrast) spectra of dilute two-component atomic Bose gases in the low angular momentum regime, assuming equal interspecies and intraspecies interaction. Our analysis employs the composite fermion (CF) approach including a pseudospin degree of freedom. While the CF approach is not {\it a priori} expected to work well in this angular momentum regime, we show that composite fermion diagonalization gives remarkably accurate approximations to low energy states in the spectra. For angular momenta $0 < L < M$ (where $N$ and $M$ denote the numbers of particles of the two species…
The discovery of relativistic spin-1/2 fermions such as Dirac and Weyl fermions in condensed-matter or artificial systems opens a new era in modern physics. An interesting but rarely explored question is whether other relativistic spinal excitations could be realized with artificial systems. Here, we construct twoand three-dimensional tight-binding models realizable with cold fermionic atoms in optical lattices, where the low energy excitations are effectively described by the spin-1 Maxwell equations in the Hamiltonian form. These relativistic (linear dispersion) excitations with unconvention…
Novel fermionic quasiparticles with integer pseudospins in some energy bands, such as pseudospin-1 triple-point fermions, recently attract increasing interest since they are beyond the conventional spin-$1/2$ Dirac and Weyl counterparts. In this paper, we propose a class of pseudospin-1 fermioic excitations emerging in topological metal bands, dubbed double-triple-point (DTP) fermions. We first present a general three-band continuum model with $C_4$ symmetry in three dimensions, which has three types of threefold degenerate points in the bands classified by their topological charges $C=\pm4,\p…
We consider a mixture of two species of spin-1 atoms with interspecies spin exchange, which may cooperate or compete with the intraspecies spin exchanges and thus dramatically affect the ground state. It represents a new class of bosonic gases differing from single-species spinor gases. We determine the exact ground states in several parameter regimes, and study the composite structures by using the generating function method generalized here to be applicable to a mixture of two species of spinor gases. The most interesting phase is the so-called entangled Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC), whi…
We show that an antiferrosmectic-C phase has lower energy at high densities than the non-magnetized Fermi gas and ferronematic phases in an ultracold gas of fermionic atoms, or molecules, with large magnetic dipole moments. This phase, which is analogous to meson condensation in dense nuclear matter, is a one-dimensional periodic structure in which the fermions localize in layers with their pseudospin direction aligned parallel to the layers, and staggered layer by layer.
We study two-component (or pseudospin-1/2) Bose gases in a strong synthetic magnetic field. Using exact diagonalization, we show that a bosonic analogue of an integer quantum Hall state with no intrinsic topological order appears at the total filling factor ν=1+1 when the strengths of intracomponent and intercomponent interactions are comparable with each other. This provides a prime example of a symmetry-protected topological phase in a controlled setting of quantum gases. The real-space entanglement spectrum of this state is found to be comprised of counter-propagating chiral modes consisten…
The experimental realization of quantum degenerate cold Fermi gases with large hyperfine spins opens up a new opportunity for exotic many-body physics.
We analyze the possible types of ordering in a boson--fermion model. The Hamiltonian is inherently related to the Bose--Hubbard model for vector two-species bosons in optical lattices. We show that such model can be reduced to the Kugel--Khomskii type spin--pseudospin model, but in contrast to the usual version of the latter model, we are dealing here with the case of spin $S=1$ and pseudospin $1/2$. We show that the interplay of spin and pseudospin degrees of freedom leads to a rather nontrivial magnetic phase diagram including the spin-nematic configurations. Tuning the spin-channel interact…
We study a three-component superfluid Fermi gas in a spherically symmetric harmonic trap using the Bogoliubov-deGennes method. We predict a coexistence phase in which two pairing field order parameters are simultaneously nonzero, in stark contrast to studies performed for trapped gases using local density approximation. We also discuss the role of atom number conservation in the context of a homogeneous system.
We study the ground-state phase diagram of two-dimensional two-component (or pseudospin-1/2) Bose gases in mutually antiparallel synthetic magnetic fields in the space of the total filling factor and the ratio of the intercomponent coupling $g_{\uparrow\downarrow}$ to the intracomponent one g>0. This time-reversal-invariant setting represents a bosonic analogue of spin Hall systems. Using exact diagonalization, we find that (fractional) quantum spin Hall states composed of a pair of nearly independent quantum Hall states are remarkably robust and persist for $g_{\uparrow\downarrow}$ up to as l…
Universal relations are important for understanding strongly interacting Fermi gases, the study of which have been mostly limited to cases with a single scattering channel. Here we discover a series universal relations for strongly interacting Fermi gases with multiple scattering channels. Unlike its counterpart across a single channel wide magnetic Feshbach resonance, a new kind of contact which we call the cross-channel contact naturally appears in this system, this contact is related to varies thermodynamic quantities as well as short range correlation functions.
We study the propagation of dispersive waves in superfluid Fermi gases in the BEC-BCS crossover. Unlike in other superfluid systems, where dispersive waves have already been studied and observed, Fermi gases can exhibit a subsonic dispersion relation for which the dispersive wave pattern appears at the tail of the wave front. We show that this property can be used to distinguish between a subsonic and a supersonic dispersion relation at unitarity.
We treat small trapped unequal-mass two-component Fermi gases at unitarity within a non-perturbative microscopic framework and investigate the system properties as functions of the mass ratio $κ$, and the numbers $N_{1}$ and $N_2$ of heavy and light fermions. While equal-mass Fermi gases with infinitely large interspecies s-wave scattering length $a_s$ are universal, we find that unequal mass Fermi gases are, for sufficiently large $κ$ and in the regime where Efimov physics is absent, not universal. In particular, the $(N_1,N_2)=(2,1)$ and $(3,1)$ systems exhibit three-body (3b) and four-body …
We derive the phonon damping rate due to the four-phonon Landau-Khalatnikov process in low temperature strongly interacting Fermi gases using quantum hydrodynamics, correcting and extending the original calculation of Landau and Khalatnikov [ZhETF, 19 (1949) 637]. Our predictions can be tested in state-of-the-art experiments with cold atomic gases in the collisionless regime.
We present a summary of some recent theoretical results for matter-wave patterns in Fermi and Bose-Fermi degenerate gases, obtained in the framework of the quasi-mean-field approximation. We perform a dimensional reduction from the three-dimensional (3D) equations of motion to 2D and 1D effective equations. In both cases, comparison of the low-dimensional reductions to the full model is performed, showing very good agreement for ground-state solutions. Some complex dynamical regimes are reported too for the corresponding 1D systems.
We investigate thermodynamics and quantum criticality of strongly attractive Fermi gases confined in a one-dimensional (1D) harmonic trap. Finite temperature density profiles, entropy, compressibility and susceptibility of the trapped gas are studied using analytic results for the thermodynamics within the local density approximation. We demonstrate that current experiments are capable of measuring universal Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid physics and quantum criticality of 1D strongly interacting Fermi gases. The results provide insights on recent measurements of key features of the phase diagram o…
The rotation of two-component Fermi gases and the subsequent appearance of vortices have been the subject of numerous experimental and theoretical studies. Recent experimental advances in hyperfine state-dependent potentials and highly degenerate heteronuclear Fermi gases suggest that it would be feasible to create component-dependent rotation potentials in future experiments. In this study we use an effective field theory for Fermi gases to consider the effects of rotating only one component of the Fermi gas. We find that the superfluid band gap in bulk exists up to higher rotation frequencie…
We study Fermi gases in two dimensions at low temperatures with attractive interactions. Analytical results are derived for the equation of state and the Kosterlitz-Thouless transition temperature as functions of the two-body binding energy and the density of the gas. Our results for the equation of state strongly deviate from the mean field predictions. However, they are in reasonable agreement with Monte-Carlo calculations and recent experiments with cold atomic gases.
We show that a single dark soliton can exist in a spin-orbit-coupled Fermi gas with a high spin imbalance, where spin-orbit coupling favors uniform superfluids over non-uniform Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov states, leading to dark soliton excitations in highly imbalanced gases. Above a critical spin imbalance, two topological Majorana fermions (MFs) without interactions can coexist inside a dark soliton, paving a way for manipulating MFs through controlling solitons. At the topological transition point, the atom density contrast across the soliton suddenly vanishes, suggesting a signature f…
We theoretically investigate the response of a two component Fermi gas to vector potentials which couple separately to the two spin components. Such vector potentials may be implemented in ultracold atomic gases using optically dressed states. Our study indicates that light-induced gauge potentials may be used to probe the properies of the interacting ultracold Fermi gas, providing. amongst other things, ways to measure the superfluid density and the strength of pairing.
This article provides a brief review of how various spectroscopies have been used to investitage many-body quantum phenomena in the context of ultracold Fermi gases. In particular, work done with RF spectroscopy, Bragg spectroscopy and lattice modulation spectroscopy is considered. The theoretical basis of these spectroscopies, namely linear response theory in the many-body quantum physics context is briefly presented. Experiments related to the BCS-BEC crossover, imbalanced Fermi gases, polarons, possible pseudogap and Fermi liquid behaviour and measuring the contact are discussed. Remaining …
Weyl fermion, also referred to as pseudo-magnetic monopole in momentum space, is an undiscovered massless elementary particle with half-integer spin predicted according to relativistic quantum field theory. Motivated by the recent experimental observation of Weyl semimetal band in ultracold Bose gases with Raman-assisted 3D spin-orbit coupling, we investigate the properties and possible observation of Weyl fermions in the low-energy quasi-particle excitations of ultracold Fermi gases. Following a previous suggestion that the existing Raman lattice scheme can be readily generalized to fermionic…
We consider a mixture of two-component Fermi and (one-component) dipolar Bose gases in which both dipolar interaction and s-wave scattering between fermions of opposite spins are tunable. We show that in the long wavelength limit, the anisotropy in the Fermi-Fermi interaction induced by phonons of the dipolar condensate can strongly enhance the scattering in the triplet channel. We investigate in detail the conditions for achieving optimal critical temperature at which the triplet superfluid begins to compete with the singlet superfluid.
The shear viscosity plays an important role in studies of transport phenomena in ultracold Fermi gases and serves as a diagnostic of various microscopic theories. Due to the complicated phase structures of population-imbalanced Fermi gases, past works mainly focus on unpolarized Fermi gases. Here we investigate the shear viscosity of homogeneous, population-imbalanced Fermi gases with tunable attractive interactions at finite temperatures by using a pairing fluctuation theory for thermodynamical quantities and a gauge-invariant linear response theory for transport coefficients. In the unitary …
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…
We study non-equilibrium dynamics of ultracold two-component Fermi gases in low-dimensional geometries after the interactions are quenched from weakly interacting to strongly interacting regime. We develop a T-matrix formalism that takes into account the interplay between Pauli blocking and tight confinement in low-dimensional geometries. We employ our formalism to study the formation of molecules in quasi-two-dimensional Fermi gases near Feshbach resonance and show that the rate at which molecules form depends strongly on the transverse confinement. Furthermore, Pauli blocking gives rise to a…
A significant feature of the one-dimensional super Tonks-Girardeau gas is its metastable gas-like state with a stronger Fermi-like pressure than for free fermions which prevents a collapse of atoms. This naturally suggests a way to search for such strongly correlated behaviour in systems of interacting fermions in one dimension. We thus show that the strongly attractive Fermi gas without polarization can be effectively described by a super Tonks-Girardeau gas composed of bosonic Fermi pairs with attractive pair-pair interaction. A natural description of such super Tonks-Girardeau gases is prov…
We theoretically study the normal phase properties of strongly interacting two-component Fermi gases in two spatial dimensions. In the limit of weak attraction, we find that the gas can be described in terms of effective polarons. As the attraction between fermions increases, we find a crossover from a gas of non-interacting polarons to a pseudogap regime. We investigate how this crossover is manifested in the radio-frequency (rf) spectroscopy. Our findings qualitatively explain the differences in the recent rf spectroscopy measurements of two-dimensional Fermi gases [Sommer et al., Phys. Rev.…
In the strong interaction limit, attractive fermions with $N$-component hyperfine states in a one-dimensional waveguide form unbreakable bound cluster states. We demonstrate that the ground state of strongly attractive SU($N$) Fermi gases can be effectively described by a super Tonks-Girardeau gas-like state composed of bosonic cluster states with strongly attractive cluster-cluster interaction for even $N$, and a Fermi duality of a super Tonks-Girardeau gas-like state composed of fermionic cluster states with weakly interacting cluster-cluster p-wave interaction for odd $N$.
The superfluid phases in the resonant dipolar Fermi gases are investigated by the standard mean-field theory. In contrast to the crossover from Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) to Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superfluid in the Fermi gases with the isotropic interactions, the resonant dipolar interaction leads to two completely different BEC phases of the tight-binding Fermi molecules on both sides of the resonance, which are characterized by two order parameters with the distinct internal symmetries. We point that near the resonance, the two competitive phases can coexist, and an emergent r…
It is shown that the jump in the momentum distribution of Fermi gases evolves smoothly for small and intermediate times once an interaction between the fermions is suddenly switched on. The jump does not vanish abruptly. The loci in momentum space where the jumps occur are those of the noninteracting Fermi sea. No relaxation of the Fermi surface geometry takes place.
Majorana fermions are promising candidates for storing and processing information in topological quantum computation. The ability to control such individual information carriers in trapped ultracold atomic Fermi gases is a novel theme in quantum information science. However, fermionic atoms are neutral and thus are difficult to manipulate. Here, we theoretically investigate the control of emergent Majorana fermions in one-dimensional spin-orbit coupled atomic Fermi gases. We discuss (i) how to move Majorana fermions by increasing or decreasing an effective Zeeman field, which acts like a solid…
We consider the angular momentum of a harmonically trapped, noninteracting Fermi gas subject to either rotation or to an artificial gauge field. The angular momentum of the gas is shown to display oscillations as a function of the particle number or chemical potential. This phenomenon is analogous to the de Haas - van Alphen oscillations of the magnetization in the solid-state context. However, key differences exist between the solid-state and ultracold atomic gases that we point out and analyze. We explore the dependence of the visibility of these oscillations on the physical parameters and p…
We study the angular Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) state, in which the rotation symmetry is spontaneously broken, in population imbalanced fermion gases. The superfluid gases at near T=0 are investigated on the basis of the Bogoliubov-de Gennes (BdG) equation. We find that the angular FFLO state is stabilized in the gases confined in the toroidal trap, but not in the harmonic trap. We discuss the mechanism of the angular FFLO state based on the self-one-dimensionalization of the superfluid gas.
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…
The classical Kramers problem of the kinetic theory is solved. The Kramers problem about isothermal sliding for quantum Fermi gases is considered. Quantum gases with the velocity - dependent collision frequency are considered. Specular - diffusive boundary conditions are applied. Dependence of isothermal sliding on the resulted chemical potential is found out.
We present results on the effect of short-range, attractive interactions on the properties of balanced 2D Fermi gases in the non-superfluid (normal) phase. Our approach combines the renormalization group (RG) with perturbation theory, yielding observables such as the equation of state and compressibility. We find good agreement with recent experiments that measured the equation of state in trapped gases in the balanced regime, showing that these results are consistent with logarithmic corrections in the equation of state.
The induced interaction among the majority spin species, due to the presence of the minority species, is computed for the case of a population-imbalanced resonantly-interacting Fermi gas. It is shown that this interaction leads to an instability, at low temperatures, of the recently observed polaron Fermi liquid phase of strongly imbalanced Fermi gases to a p-wave superfluid state. We find that the associated transition temperature, while quite small in the weakly interacting BCS regime, is experimentally accessible in the strongly interacting unitary regime.
The two-component Fermi gas in a double-well trap is studied using the density functional theory and the density profile of each component is calculated within the Thomas-Fermi approximation. We show that the two components are spatially separate in the two wells once the repulsive interaction exceeds the Stoner point, signaling the occurrence of the ferromagnetic transition. Therefore, the double-well trap helps to explore itinerant ferromagnetism in atomic Fermi gases, since the spontaneous separation can be examined by measuring component populations in one well.
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.
One-dimensional Bose and Fermi gases with contact interactions are known to exhibit the weak-strong duality, where the equilibrium thermodynamic properties of one system at weak coupling are identical to those of the other system at strong coupling. Here, we show that such duality extends beyond the thermodynamics to the frequency-dependent complex bulk viscosity, which is provided by the contact-contact response function. In particular, we confirm that the bulk viscosities of the Bose and Fermi gases agree in the high-temperature limit, where the systematic expansion in terms of fugacity is a…
The charged Fermi gas with a small Lande-factor $g$ is expected to be diamagnetic, while that with a larger $g$ could be paramagnetic. We calculate the critical value of the $g$-factor which separates the dia- and para-magnetic regions. In the weak-field limit, $g_{c}$ has the same value both at high and low temperatures, $g_{c}=1/\sqrt{12}$. Nevertheless, $g_{c}$ increases with the temperature reducing in finite magnetic fields. We also compare the $g_{c}$ value of Fermi gases with those of Boltzmann and Bose gases, supposing the particle has three Zeeman levels $σ=\pm1, 0$, and find that $g_…
The classical Kramers problem of the kinetic theory is analytically solved. The Kramers problem about isothermal sliding for quantum Fermi gases is considered. Quantum gases with the velocity-dependent collision frequency are considered. Diffusive boundary conditions are applied. Dependence of isothermal sliding on the resulted chemical potential is found out.
Ultracold quantum gases of equal spin fermions with short range interactions are often considered free even in the presence of strongly binding spin-up-spin-down pairs. We describe a large class of many-particle Schrödinger operators with short-range pair interactions, where this approximation can be justified rigorously.
We investigate the superfluid transition temperature of quasi-two-dimensional imbalanced Fermi gases beyond the mean-field approximation, through the second-order (or induced) interaction effects. For a balanced Fermi system the transition temperature is suppressed by a factor $\approx 2.72$. For imbalanced Fermi systems, the polarization and transition temperature of the tricritical point are significantly reduced as the two-body binding energy $|ε_B|$ increases.
ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum-Atom Optics, Centre for Atom Optics and Ultrafast Spectroscopy, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne 3122, Australia
We show how Fermi liquid theory can be applied to ultra-cold Fermi gases, thereby expanding their "simulation" capabilities to a class of problems of interest to multiple physics sub-disciplines. We introduce procedures for measuring and calculating position dependent Landau parameters. This lays the ground work for addressing important controversial issues: (i) the suggestion that thermodynamically, the normal state of a unitary gas is indistinguishable from a Fermi liquid (ii) that a fermionic system with strong repulsive contact interactions is associated with either ferromagnetism or local…
Many strongly coupled fluids are known to share similar hydrodynamic transport properties. In this work we argue that this similarity could extend beyond hydrodynamics to transient dynamics through the presence of non-hydrodynamic modes. We review non-hydrodynamic modes in kinetic theory and gauge/gravity duality and discuss their signatures in trapped Fermi gases close to unitarity. Reanalyzing previously published experimental data, we find hints of non-hydrodynamic modes in cold Fermi gases in two and three dimensions.
The recently realized spin-orbit coupled quantum gases (Y.-J Lin {\it et al}., Nature 471, 83-86 (2011); P. Wang {\it et al}., PRL 109, 095301 (2012); L. W. Cheuk {\it et al}., PRL 109, 095302 (2012)) mark a breakthrough in the cold atom community. In these experiments, two hyperfine states are selected from a hyperfine manifold to mimic a pseudospin-1/2 spin-orbit coupled system by the method of Raman dressing, which is applicable to both bosonic and fermionic gases. In this work, we show that the method used in these experiments can be generalized to create any large pseudospin spin-orbit co…
