We develop a microscopic model to describe the Josephson dynamics between two superfluid reservoirs of ultracold fermionic atoms which accounts for the dependence of the critical current on both the barrier height and the interaction strength along the crossover from BCS to BEC. Building on a previous study [F. Meier & W. Zwerger, Phys. Rev. A, 64 033610 (2001)] of weakly-interacting bosons, we derive analytic results for the Josephson critical current at zero temperature for homogeneous and trapped systems at arbitrary coupling. The critical current exhibits a maximum near the unitarity limit which arises from the competition between the increasing condensate fraction and a decrease of the chemical potential along the evolution from the BCS to the BEC limit. Our results agree quantitatively with numerical simulations and recent experimental data.
We report on the observation of the Josephson effect between two strongly interacting fermionic superfluids coupled through a thin tunneling barrier. We prove that the relative population and phase are canonically conjugate dynamical variables, coherently oscillating throughout the entire crossover from molecular Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) to Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superfluids. We measure the plasma frequency and we extract the Josephson coupling energy, both exhibiting a non-monotonic behavior with a maximum near the crossover regime. We also observe the transition from coherent…
We investigate the macroscopic quantum tunneling of fermionic superfluids in the two-dimensional BCS-BEC crossover by using an effective tunneling energy which explicitly depends on the condensate fraction and the chemical potential of the system. We compare the mean-field effective tunneling energy with the beyond-mean-field one finding that the mean-field tunneling energy is not reliable in the BEC regime of the crossover. Then we solve the Josephson equations of the population imbalance and the relative phase calculating the frequency of tunneling oscillation both in the linear regime and i…
It has been recently suggested that the Bose-Einstein condensate formed by excitons in the dilute limit must be dark, i.e., not coupled to photons. Here, we show that, under a density increase, the dark exciton condensate must acquire a bright component due to carrier exchange in which dark excitons turn bright. This however requires a density larger than a threshold which seems to fall in the forbidden region of the phase separation between a dilute exciton gas and a dense electron-hole plasma. The BCS-like condensation which is likely to take place on the dense side, must then have a dark an…
We investigate the evolution of the Josephson and related effects throughout the BCS-BEC crossover, by performing a systematic numerical solution of the (time-independent) Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations at zero temperature in a fully self-consistent fashion. The numerical strategies and algorithms we have adopted are described in detail, with the aim of easing further independent studies. Several results are obtained by the present calculation. The profiles of the magnitude and phase of the gap parameter across the Josephson barrier are determined under a variety of conditions. We find that th…
Dark solitons in superfluid Bose gases decay through the snake instability mechanism, unless they are strongly confined. Recent experiments in superfluid Fermi gases have also interpreted soliton decay via this mechanism. However, we show using both an effective field numerical simulation and a perturbative analysis that there is a qualitative difference between soliton decay in the BEC- and BCS-regimes. On the BEC-side of the interaction domain, the characteristic snaking deformations are induced by fluctuations of the amplitude of the order parameter, while on the BCS-side, fluctuations of t…
We consider a ground-state wide-gap band insulator turning into a nonequilibrium excitonic insulator (NEQ-EI) upon visiting properly selected and physically relevant highly excited states. The NEQ-EI phase, characterized by self-sustained oscillations of the complex order parameter, neatly follows from a Nonequilibrium Green's Function treatment on the Konstantinov-Perel' contour. We present the first {\em ab initio} band structure of LiF, a ground-state bulk insulator, in different NEQ-EI states and show that these states can be generated by currently available pump pulses. We highlight two g…
We first show that the many-body Hamiltonian governing the physical properties of an alkaline-earth Yb-173 Fermi gas across the recently-realized orbital Feshbach resonance is exactly analogous to that of two-band s-wave superconductors with contact interactions: i.e., even though the free-particle bands have a tunable energy offset in between and are coupled by a Josephson-type attractive inter-band pair scattering, the intra-band interactions have exactly the same strength. We then introduce two intra-band order parameters within the BCS mean-field approximation, and investigate the competit…
We show that the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer state (BCS) and the Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) sides of the BCS-BEC crossover can be rigorously distinguished from each other by the extrema of the spectrum of the fermionic excitations. Moreover, we demonstrate that this formal distinction is realized as a non-equilibrium phase transition under radio frequency radiation. The BEC phase remains translationally invariant, whereas the BCS phase transforms into the supersolid phase. For a two-dimensional system this effect occurs at arbitrary small amplitude of the radiation field.
We study pseudogap behaviors of ultracold Fermi gases in the BCS-BEC crossover region. We calculate the density of states (DOS), as well as the single-particle spectral weight, above the superfluid transition temperature $T_{\rm c}$ including pairing fluctuations within a $T$-matrix approximation. We find that DOS exhibits a pseudogap structure in the BCS-BEC crossover region, which is most remarkable near the unitarity limit. We determine the pseudogap temperature $T^*$ at which the pseudogap structure in DOS disappears. We also introduce another temperature $T^{**}$ at which the BCS-like dou…
We derive a generalized time-dependent Galilean-invariant density-functional (DF) equation appropriate to study the stationary and non-stationary properties of a trapped Fermi super-fluid in the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) to Bose-Einstein condensation (BCS) crossover. This equation is equivalent to a quantum hydrodynamical equation for a Fermi super-fluid. The bulk chemical potential of this equation has the proper (model-independent) dependence on the Fermi-Fermi scattering length in the BCS and BEC limits. We apply this DF equation to the study of stationary density profile and size of …
We develop a self-consistent theory unifying the description of a quantum Fermi gas in the presence of a Fano-Feshbach resonance in the whole phase diagram ranging from BCS to BEC type of superfluidity and from narrow to broad resonances, including the fluctuations beyond mean field. Our theory covers a part of the phase diagram which is not easily accessible by Quantum Monte Carlo simulations and is becoming interesting for a new class of experiments in cold atoms.
We investigate the phase diagram and the BCS-BEC crossover of a homogeneous three-component ultracold Fermi gas with a U(3) invariant attractive interaction. We show that the system at sufficiently low temperatures exhibits population imbalance, as well as fermionic pairing. We describe the crossover in this system, connecting the weakly interacting BCS regime of the partially population-imbalanced fermion pairing state and the BEC limit with three weakly interacting species of molecules, including pairing fluctuations within a t-matrix calculation of the particle self-energies.
We show that the long-distance behavior of the two-body density correlation functions and the Cooper-pair probability density of a balanced mixture of a two-component Fermi gas at $T = 0$, is universal along the BEC-BCS crossover. Our result is demonstrated by numerically solving the mean-field BCS model for different finite short-range atomic interaction potentials. We find an analytic expression for the correlation length in terms of the chemical potential and the energy gap at zero momentum.
We investigate the crossover from Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superfluidity to Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) in a two-dimensional Fermi gas at T=0 using the fixed-node diffusion Monte Carlo method. We calculate the equation of state and the gap parameter as a function of the interaction strength, observing large deviations compared to mean-field predictions. In the BEC regime our results show the important role of dimer-dimer and atom-dimer interaction effects that are completely neglected in the mean-field picture. Results on Tan's contact parameter associated with short-range physics …
We analyze the BCS-BEC crossover transition of a balanced two component mixture of fermions interacting via a finite range potential, within a mean field approach. For the analysis we consider three finite range potentials cases describing the interaction between different Fermi species: a square well, an exponential and a Yukawa potential. The T = 0 thermodynamics analysis along the BCS-BEC crossover allow us to recognize the proper variables, for finite range interactions, that capture the transition from a thermodynamic non-universal behavior at unitarity, to its universal restoration. On t…
We compute the shear viscosity, $η$, at general temperatures $T$, in a BCS-BEC crossover scheme which is demonstrably consistent with conservation laws. The study of $η$ is important because it constrains microscopic theories by revealing the excitation spectra. The onset of a normal state pairing gap and the contribution from pair degrees of freedom imply that $η$ at low $T$ becomes small, rather than exhibiting the upturn predicted by most others. Using the local density approximation, we find quite reasonable agreement with just-published experiments.
This chapter presents the crossover from the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) state of weakly-correlated pairs of fermions to the Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of diatomic molecules in the atomic Fermi gas. Our aim is to provide a pedagogical review of the BCS-BEC crossover, with an emphasis on the basic concepts, particularly those that are not generally known or are difficult to find in the literature. We shall not attempt to give an exhaustive survey of current research in the limited space here; where possible, we will direct the reader to more extensive reviews.
This paper gives a survey of a diagrammatic approach for fermionic pairing fluctuations, which are relevant to the BCS-BEC crossover realized with ultracold Fermi gases. Emphasis will be given to the physical intuition about the relevant physical processes that can be associated with this approach. Specific results will be presented for thermodynamic and dynamical quantities, where a critical comparison with alternative diagrammatic approaches will also be attempted.
The effective action describing the gapless Nambu-Goldstone, or Anderson-Bogoliubov, mode of a zero-temperature dilute Fermi gas at unitarity is derived up to next-to-leading order in derivatives from the microscopic theory. Apart from a next-to-leading order term that is suppressed in the BCS limit, the effective action obtained in the strong-coupling unitary limit is proportional to that in the weak-coupling BCS limit.
We theoretically investigate the shear viscosity $η$ in the BCS-BEC crossover regime of an ultracold Fermi gas with a Feshbach resonance. Within the framework of the strong-coupling self-consistent $T$-matrix approximation, we examine how a strong pairing interaction associated with a Feshbach resonance affects this transport coefficient, in the normal state above the superfluid phase transition temperature $T_{\rm c}$. We show that, while $η$ diverges in both the weak-coupling BCS and strong-coupling BEC limits, it becomes small in the unitary regime. The minimum of $η$ is obtained, not at th…
We investigate single-particle excitations and strong-coupling effects in the BCS-BEC crossover regime of a superfluid Fermi gas. Including phase and amplitude fluctuations of the superfluid order parameter within a $T$-matrix theory, we calculate the superfluid density of states (DOS), as well as single-particle spectral weight, over the entire BCS-BEC crossover region below the superfluid transition temperature $T_{\rm c}$. We clarify how the pseudogap in the normal state evolves into the superfluid gap, as one passes through $T_{\rm c}$. While the pseudogap in DOS continuously evolves into …
We consider two weakly coupled Richardson models to study the formation of a relative phase and the Josephson dynamics between two mesoscopic attractively interacting fermionic systems: our results apply to superconducting properties of coupled ultrasmall metallic grains and to Cooper-pairing superfluidity in neutral systems with a finite number of fermions. We discuss how a definite relative phase between the two systems emerges and how it can be conveniently extracted from the many-body wavefunction: we find that a definite relative phase difference emerges even for very small numbers of pai…
The crossover between low and high density regimes of exciton-polariton condensates is examined using a BCS wavefunction approach. Our approach is an extension of the BEC-BCS crossover theory for excitons, but includes a cavity photon field. The approach can describe both the low density limit, where the system can be described as a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of exciton-polaritons, and the high density limit, where the system enters a photon dominated regime. In contrast to the exciton BEC-BCS crossover where the system approaches an electron-hole plasma, the polariton high density limit h…
We investigate the BCS-BEC crossover taking into account an additional three-body interaction, which is essentially the scattering between the Cooper pairs and the newly formed bosons. We show that if the two-body interaction is attractive, the presence of this additional three-body term makes the crossover process a nonreversible one. Starting from a stable Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) state, crossover to BCS can be achieved; but if the BCS state is the starting point, instead of a stable BEC region, what the system crosses over to is a metastable condensed state.
We study theoretically two spatially separate quasi-one-dimensional atomic Fermi gases in a double-well trap. By tuning independently their spin polarizations, a Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) superfluid or a Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superfluid may be formed in each well. We seek the possibility of creating a spatially tunable atomic Josephson junction between two superfluids, which is supposed to be realizable via building a weak link at given positions of the double-well barrier. We show that within mean-field theory the maximum Josephson current is proportional to the order …
We study thermodynamics of a two-species Feshbach-resonant atomic Fermi gas in a periodic potential, focusing in a deep optical potential where a tight binding model is applicable. We show that for more than half-filled band the gas exhibits a reentrant crossover with decreased detuning (increased attractive interaction), from a paired BCS superfluid to a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of molecules of holes, back to the BCS superfluid, and finally to a conventional BEC of diatomic molecules. This behavior is associated with the non-monotonic dependence of the chemical potential on detuning and…
The theoretical description of the critical temperature Tc of a Fermi superfluid dates back to the work by Gor'kov and Melik-Barkhudarov (GMB), who addressed it for a weakly-coupled (dilute) superfluid in the BCS (weak-coupling) limit of the BCS-BEC crossover. The point made by GMB was that particle-particle (pairing) excitations, which are responsible for superfluidity to occur below Tc, and particle-hole excitations, which give rise to screening also in a normal system, get effectively disentangled from each other in the BCS limit, thus yielding a reduction by a factor 2.2 of the value of Tc…
We calculate the parameters of the Ginzburg-Landau (GL) equation of a three-dimensional attractive Fermi gas around the superfluid critical temperature. We compare different levels of approximation throughout the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) to the Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) regime. We show that the inclusion of Gaussian fluctuations strongly modifies the values of the Ginzburg-Landau parameters approaching the BEC regime of the crossover. We investigate the reliability of the Ginzburg-Landau theory, with fluctuations, studying the behavior of the coherence length and of the critical ro…
By including the effect of a trap with characteristic energy given by the Fermi temperature $T_F$ in a two-body two-channel model for Feshbach resonances, we reproduce the experimental closed-channel fraction $Z$ across the BEC-BCS crossover and into the BCS regime of a $^6$Li atomic Fermi gas. We obtain the expected behavior $Z \propto \sqrt{T_F}$ at unitarity, together with the recently measured proportionality constant. Our results are also in agreement with recent measurements of the $Z$ dependency on $T_F$ on the BCS side, where a significant discrepancy between experiments and theory has…
We study the effect of the induced interaction on the superfluid transition temperature of a Fermi gas with a BEC-BCS crossover. The Gorkov-Melik-Barkhudarov theory about the induced interaction is extended from the BCS side to the entire crossover, and the pairing fluctuation is treated in the approach by Nozières and Schmitt-Rink. At unitarity, the induced interaction reduces the transition temperature by about twenty percent. In the BCS limit, the transition temperature is reduced by a factor about 2.22, as found by Gorkov and Melik-Barkhudarov. Our result shows that the effect of the induc…
We report $T=0$ diffusion Monte Carlo results for the ground-state and vortex excitation of unpolarized spin-1/2 fermions in a two-dimensional disk. We investigate how vortex core structure properties behave over the BEC-BCS crossover. We calculate the vortex excitation energy, density profiles, and vortex core properties related to the current. We find a density suppression at the vortex core on the BCS side of the crossover, and a depleted core on the BEC limit. Size-effect dependencies in the disk geometry were carefully studied.
We determine the size of the critical region of the superfluid transition in the BCS-BEC crossover of a three-dimensional fermion gas, using a renormalization-group approach to a bosonic theory of pairing fluctuations. For the unitary Fermi gas, we find a sizable critical region $[T_G^-,T_G^+]$, of order $T_c$, around the transition temperature $T_c$ with a pronounced asymmetry: $|T_G^+-T_c|/|T_G^--T_c|\sim8$. The critical region is strongly suppressed on the BCS side of the crossover but remains important on the BEC side.
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…
We in this paper investigate the phase diagram associated with the BCS-BEC crossover of a three-component ultracold superfluid-Fermi-gas of different chemical-potentials and equal masses in two dimensions. The gap order parameter and number densities are found analytically by using the functional path-integral method. The balance of paring will be broken in the free space due to the unequal chemical-potentials. We obtain the same particle number-density and condensed fraction in the BCS superfluid phase as that in a recent paper (Phys. Rev. A 83, 033630), while the Sarma phase of coexistence o…
We investigate the three-dimensional BCS-BEC crossover in the presence of a Rabi coupling which strongly affects several properties of the system, such as the chemical potential, the pairing gap and the superfluid density. We determine the critical interaction strength, below which the system is normal also at zero temperature. Finally, we calculate the effect of the Rabi coupling on the critical temperature of the superfluid-to-normal phase transition by using different theoretical schemes.
It is shown that a cluster expansion technique, which is usually applied in the high-temperature regime to calcutate virial coefficients, can be applied to evaluate the superfluid transition temperature of the BCS-BEC crossover à la Lee and Yang. The transition temperature is identified with the emergence of the singularity in the sum of a certain infinite series of cluster functions. In the weak-coupling limit, we reproduce the Thouless criterion and the number equation of Nozières and Schmitt-Rink, and hence the transition temperature of the BCS theory. In the strong-coupling limit, we repro…
We discuss the derivation of a low-energy effective field theory of phase (Goldstone) and amplitude (Higgs) modes of the pairing field from a microscopic theory of attractive fermions. The coupled equations for Goldstone and Higgs fields are critically analyzed in the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) to Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) crossover both in three spatial dimensions and in two spatial dimensions. The crucial role of pair fluctuations is investigated, and the beyond-mean-field Gaussian theory of the BCS-BEC crossover is compared with available experimental data of the two-dimensional u…
We review the BCS-BEC crossover in relativistic Fermi systems, including the QCD matter at finite density. In the first part we study the BCS-BEC crossover in a relativistic four-fermion interaction model and show how the relativistic effect affects the BCS-BEC crossover. In the second part, we investigate both two-color QCD at finite baryon density and pion superfluid at finite isospin density, by using an effective Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model. We will show how the model describes the weakly interacting diquark and pion condensates at low density and the BEC-BCS crossover at high density.
We investigate the crossover from the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) state of weakly-bound Cooper pairs to the Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) of strongly-bound molecular dimers in a gas of ultracold atoms loaded on a two-dimensional optical lattice. By using the the mean-field BCS equations of the emerging Hubbard model and the concept of off-diagonal-long-range-order for fermions we calculate analytically and numerically the pair binding energy, the energy gap and the condensate fraction of Cooper pairs as a function of interaction strength and filling fractor of atoms in the lattice at zero…
We present a theory of superconducting p-n junctions. We consider a 2-band model of doped bulk semiconductors with attractive interactions between the charge carriers and derive the superconducting order parameter, the quasiparticle density of states and the chemical potential as a function of semiconductor gap $Δ_0$ and the doping level $\varepsilon$. We verify previous results for the quantum phase diagram (QPD) for a system with constant density of states in the conduction and valence band, which show BCS-Superconductor to Bose-Einstein-Condensation (BEC) and BEC to Insulator transitions as…
We study the emergence of dissipation in an atomic Josephson junction between weakly-coupled superfluid Fermi gases. We find that vortex-induced phase slippage is the dominant microscopic source of dissipation across the BEC-BCS crossover. We explore different dynamical regimes by tuning the bias chemical potential between the two superfluid reservoirs. For small excitations, we observe dissipation and phase coherence to coexist, with a resistive current followed by well-defined Josephson oscillations. We link the junction transport properties to the phase-slippage mechanism, finding that vort…
We present a theory of a two-component atomic Fermi gas with tunable attractive contact interactions on a spherical shell going through the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) - Bose Einstein condensation (BEC) crossover, inspired by the realizations of spherical bubble traps for ultracold atoms in microgravity. The derivation follows the BCS-Leggett theory to obtain the gap and number equations. The BCS-BEC crossover can be induced by tuning the interaction, and the properly normalized gap and chemical potential exhibit universal behavior regardless of the planar or spherical geometry. Neverthele…
We investigate chiral symmetry breaking in a model of Dirac fermions with a complexified coupling constant whose imaginary part represents dissipation. We introduce a chiral chemical potential and observe that for real coupling a relativistic BCS-BEC crossover is realized. We solve the model in the mean-field approximation and construct the phase diagram as a function of the complex coupling. It is found that the dynamical mass increases under dissipation, although the chiral symmetry gets restored if dissipation exceeds a threshold.
We observe a long-lived solitary wave in a superfluid Fermi gas of $^6$Li atoms after phase-imprinting. Tomographic imaging reveals the excitation to be a solitonic vortex, oriented transverse to the long axis of the cigar-shaped atom cloud. The precessional motion of the vortex is directly observed, and its period is measured as a function of the chemical potential in the BEC-BCS crossover. The long period and the correspondingly large ratio of the inertial to the bare mass of the vortex are in good agreement with estimates based on superfluid hydrodynamics that we derive here using the known…
The subject of BCS - Bose Einstein condensation (BEC) crossover is particularly exciting because of its realization in ultracold Fermi gases and its possible relevance to high temperature superconductors. In the paper we review that body of theoretical work on this subject which represents a natural extension of the seminal papers by Leggett and by Nozieres and Schmitt-Rink (NSR). The former addressed only the ground state, now known as the "BCS-Leggett" wave-function and the key contributions of the latter pertain to calculations of the superfluid transition temperature $T_c$. These two paper…
We analyse a p+ip-wave pairing BCS Hamiltonian, coupled to a single bosonic degree of freedom representing a molecular condensate, and investigate the nature of the BEC-BCS crossover for this system. For a suitable restriction on the coupling parameters, we show that the model is integrable and we derive the exact solution by the algebraic Bethe ansatz. In this manner we also obtain explicit formulae for correlation functions and compute these for several cases. We find that the crossover between the BEC state and the strong pairing p+ip phase is smooth for this model, with no intermediate qua…
We present a stability analysis on a driven-dissipative electron-hole condensate in the BCS (Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer)-BEC (Bose-Einstein-condensation)-crossover region. Extending the combined BCS-Leggett theory with the generalized random phase approximation (GRPA) to the non-equilibrium case by employing the Keldysh formalism, we show that the pumping-and-decay of carriers causes a depairing effect on excitons. This phenomenon gives rise to an attractive interaction between excitons in the BEC regime, as well as a supercurrent that anomalously flows anti-parallel to $\nabla θ({\bf r})$ (whe…
We present a theoretical study of the ground state of the BCS-BEC crossover in dilute two-dimensional Fermi gases. While the mean-field theory provides a simple and analytical equation of state, the pressure is equal to that of a noninteracting Fermi gas in the entire BCS-BEC crossover, which is not consistent with the features of a weakly interacting Bose condensate in the BEC limit and a weakly interacting Fermi liquid in the BCS limit. The inadequacy of the 2D mean-field theory indicates that the quantum fluctuations are much more pronounced than those in 3D. In this work, we show that the …
