In this work we theoretically study pairing in two-dimensional Fermi gases, a system which is experimentally accessible using cold atoms. We start by deriving the mean-field pairing gap equation for a coordinate-space potential with a finite interaction range, and proceed to solve this numerically. We find that for sufficiently short effective ranges the answer is identical to the zero-range one. We then use Diffusion Monte Carlo to evaluate the total energy for many distinct particle numbers; we employ several variational parameters to produce a good ground-state energy and then use these results to extract the pairing gap across a number of interaction strengths in the strongly interacting two-dimensional crossover. Extracting the gap via the odd-even energy staggering, our microscopic results can be used as benchmarks for other theoretical approaches.
Within the context of Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov theory, we study the behavior of superfluid Fermi systems when they pass from a small to a large container. Such systems can be now realized thanks to recent progress in experimental techniques. It will allow to better understand pairing properties at overflow and in general in rapidly varying external potentials.
The pairing of fermionic atoms in a mixture of atomic fermion and boson gases at zero temperature is investigated. The attractive interaction between fermions, that can be induced by density fluctuations of the bosonic background, can give rise to a superfluid phase in the Fermi component of the mixture. The atoms of both species are assumed to be in only one internal state, so that the pairing of fermions is effective only in odd-l channels. No assumption about the value of the ratio between the Fermi velocity and the sound velocity in the Bose gas is made in the derivation of the energy gap …
We non-perturbatively study pairing in the high-temperature regime of polarized unitary two-component Fermi gases by extracting the pair-momentum distribution and shot-noise correlations. Whereas the pair-momentum distribution allows us to analyze the propagation of pairs composed of one spin-up and one spin-down fermion, shot-noise correlations provide us with a tomographic insight into pairing correlations around the Fermi surfaces associated with the two species. Assuming that the dominant pairing patterns right above the superfluid transition also govern the formation of condensates in the…
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…
Ultracold atomic gases and low-density neutron matter are unique in that they exhibit pairing gaps comparable to the Fermi energy which in this sense are the largest in the laboratory and in nature, respectively. This strong pairing regime, or the crossover between BCS and BEC regimes, requires non-perturbative treatments. We describe Quantum Monte Carlo results useful to understand the properties of these systems, including infinite homogeneous matter and trapped inhomogeneous gases.
We present a theoretical study of the finite-temperature Kosterlitz-Thouless (KT) and vortex-antivortex lattice (VAL) melting transitions in two-dimensional Fermi gases with $p$- or $d$-wave pairing. For both pairings, when the interaction is tuned from weak to strong attractions, we observe a quantum phase transition from the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superfluidity to the Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of difermions. The KT and VAL transition temperatures increase during this BCS-BEC transition and approach constant values in the deep BEC region. The BCS-BEC transition is characterize…
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…
We study the quench dynamics of a two-component ultracold Fermi gas from the weak into the strong interaction regime, where the short time dynamics are governed by the exponential growth rate of unstable collective modes. We obtain an effective interaction that takes into account both Pauli blocking and the energy dependence of the scattering amplitude near a Feshbach resonance. Using this interaction we analyze the competing instabilities towards Stoner ferromagnetism and pairing.
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 influence of population imbalance on the pairing, spin, and density instabilities of a two component ideal Fermi gas after a sudden quench of interactions near a Feshbach resonance. Over a large region of parameters the pairing instability is dominated by finite momentum pairing, suggesting the possibility of observing FFLO-like states in the unstable initial dynamics. Long-wavelength density instabilities are found on the BCS side of the resonance, and are interpreted as a precursor of the phase separation expected at equilibrium. On the BEC side of the resonance, the pairing ins…
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.…
It is generally believed that the BCS-BEC evolution in fermionic systems with s-wave pairing is a smooth crossover. However, for nonzero orbital-angular-momentum pairing such as p- or d-wave pairing, the system undergoes a quantum phase transition at the point where the chemical potential $μ$ vanishes. In this paper, we study the BCS-BEC quantum phase transition and the collective excitations associated with the order-parameter fluctuations in two-dimensional fermionic systems with p- and d-wave pairings. We show that the quantum phase transition in such systems can be generically traced back …
We derive a mean-field description for two-dimensional (2D) interacting Bose gases at arbitrary temperatures. We find that genuine Bose-Einstein condensation with long-range coherence only survives at zero temperature. At finite temperatures, many-body pairing effects included in our mean-field theory introduce a finite amplitude for the pairing density, which results in a finite superfluid density. We incorporate Berenzinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) physics into our model by considering the phase fluctuations of our pairing field. This then leads to the result that the superfluid phase is o…
By applying the recently proposed antisymmetric superfluid local density approximation (ASLDA) to strongly interacting polarized atomic gases at unitarity in very elongated traps, we find families of Larkin-Ovchinnikov (LO) type of solutions with prominent transversal oscillation of pairing potential. These LO states coexist with a superfluid state having a smooth pairing potential. We suggest that the LO phase could be accessible experimentally by increasing adiabatically the trap aspect ratio. We show that the local asymmetry effects contained in ASLDA do not support a deformed superfluid co…
We review some recent progresses on the study of ultracold Fermi gases with synthetic spin-orbit coupling. In particular, we focus on the pairing superfluidity in these systems at zero temperature. Recent studies have shown that different forms of spin-orbit coupling in various spatial dimensions can lead to a wealth of novel pairing superfluidity. A common theme of these variations is the emergence of new pairing mechanisms which are direct results of spin-orbit-coupling-modified single-particle dispersion spectra. As different configurations can give rise to single-particle dispersion spectr…
The growth rate of the out-of-time-ordered correlator in a N-flavor Fermi gas is investigated and the Lyapunove exponent $λ_L$ is calculated to the order of $1/N$. We find that the Lyapunove exponent monotonically increases as the the interaction strength increases from the BCS limit to the unitary region. At the unitarity the Lyapunove exponent increases while the temperature drops and it can reach to the order of $λ_L\sim T$ around the critical temperature for the $N=1$ case. The system scrambles faster for stronger pairing fluctuations. At the BCS limit, the Lyapunov exponent behaviors as $…
We study spin- and mass-imbalanced mixtures of spin-$\tfrac{1}{2}$ fermions interacting via an attractive contact potential in one spatial dimension. Specifically, we address the influence of unequal particle masses on the pair formation by means of the complex Langevin method. By computing the pair-correlation function and the associated pair-momentum distribution we find that inhomogeneous pairing is present for all studied spin polarizations and mass imbalances. To further characterize the pairing behavior, we analyze the density-density correlations in momentum space, the so-called shot no…
We present a theoretical interpretation of radio-frequency (RF) pairing gap experiments in trapped atomic Fermi gases, over the entire range of the BCS-BEC crossover, for temperatures above and below $T_c$. Our calculated RF excitation spectra, as well as the density profiles on which they are based, are in semi-quantitative agreement with experiment. We provide a detailed analysis of the physical origin of the two different peak features seen in RF spectra, one associated with nearly free atoms at the edge of the trap, and the other with (quasi-)bound fermion pairs.
To realize non-Abelian s-wave topological superfluid (TS) of cold Fermi gases, generally a Zeeman magnetic field larger than superfluid pairing gap is necessary. In this paper we find that using an anisotropic and spin-dependent optical lattice (ASDOL) to trap gases, a new non-Abelian TS phase appears, in contrast to an isotropic and spin-independent optical lattice. A characteristic of this new non-Abelian TS is that Zeeman magnetic field can be smaller than the superfluid pairing gap. By self-consistently solving pairing gap equation and considering the competition against normal state and p…
Extensive research has been lavished on effects of spin-orbit couplings (SOC) in attractively interacting Fermi systems in both neutral cold atom systems and condensed matter systems. Recently, it was suggested that a SOC drives a new class of BCS to BEC crossover which is different than the conventional one without a SOC. Here, we explore what are the most relevant physical quantities to describe such a new BCS to BEC crossover and their experimental detections. We extend the concepts of the pairing length and "Cooper-pair size" in the absence of SOC to Fermi systems with SOC. We investigate …
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 …
Ultracold two-component Fermi gases with a tunable population imbalance have provided an excellent opportunity for studying the exotic Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) states, which have been of great interest in condensed matter physics. However, the FFLO states have not been observed experimentally in Fermi gases in three dimensions (3D), possibly due to their small phase space volume and extremely low temperature required for an equal-mass Fermi gas. Here we explore possible effects of mass imbalance, mainly in a $^6$Li--$^{40}$K mixture, on the one-plane-wave FFLO phases for a 3D ho…
We study the super-counter-fluid(SCF) states in the two-component hardcore Bose-Hubbard model on the square lattice, using the quantum Monte Carlo method based on the worm(directed loop) algorithm. Since the SCF state is a state of a pair-condensation characterized by $< a^{\dagger} b > \neq 0, < a > = 0$, and $< b > = 0$, where $a$ and $b$ are the order parameters of the two components, it is important to study behaviors of the pair-correlation function $< a_{i} b_{i}^{\dagger} a_{j}^{\dagger} b_{j} >$. For this purpose, we propose a choice of the worm head for calculating the pair-correlatio…
We study the superfluid behavior of ultracold atomic Fermi gases with a short range attractive interaction in a two-dimensional optical lattice (2DOL) using a pairing fluctuation theory, within the context of BCS-BEC crossover. We find that the mixing of lattice and continuum dimensions leads to exotic phenomena. For relatively large lattice constant $d$ and small hopping integral $t$, the superfluid transition temperature $T_c$ exhibits a remarkable reentrant behavior as a function of the interaction strength, and leads to a pair density wave ground state, where $T_c$ vanishes, for a range of…
Recent experiments on ultracold Bose gases in two dimensions have provided evidence for the existence of the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) phase via analysis of the interference between two independent systems. In this work we study the two-dimensional quantum degenerate Bose gas at finite temperature using the projected Gross-Pitaevskii equation classical field method. While this describes the highly occupied modes of the gas below a momentum cutoff, we have developed a method to incorporate the higher momentum states in our model. We concentrate on finite-sized homogeneous systems in…
Motivated by recent experimental advances in ultracold atomic gases placed in cavities, we study the influence of the atom-cavity coupling on the Fermi gases trapped in optical lattices. By adiabatic elimination of the cavity photon field, the atom-cavity coupling gives rise to effective long-range interactions. It results in a variety of two-body scattering processes, during which the atomic pairs can acquire an additional center-of-mass momentum. This reveals the possibility of Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) superfluids in which the atomic pairing momentum is nonzero. By inspecting …
The superfluidity and pairing phenomena in ultracold atomic Fermi gases have been of great interest in recent years, with multiple tunable parameters. Here we study the BCS-BEC crossover behavior of balanced two-component Fermi gases in a one-dimensional optical lattice, which is distinct from the simple three-dimensional (3D) continuum and a fully 3D lattice often found in a condensed matter system. We use a pairing fluctuation theory which includes self-consistent feedback effects at finite temperatures, and find widespread pseudogap phenomena beyond the BCS regime. As a consequence of the l…
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…
Atomic Fermi gases have been an ideal platform for simulating conventional and engineering exotic physical systems owing to their multiple tunable control parameters. Here we investigate the effects of mixed dimensionality on the superfluid and pairing phenomena of a two-component ultracold atomic Fermi gas with a short-range pairing interaction, while one component is confined on a one-dimensional (1D) optical lattice whereas the other is in a homogeneous 3D continuum. We study the phase diagram and the pseudogap phenomena throughout the entire BCS-BEC crossover, using a pairing fluctuation t…
The Fulde-Ferrell (FF) superfluid phase, in which fermions form finite-momentum Cooper pairings, is well studied in spin-singlet superfluids in past decades. Different from previous works that engineer the FF state in spinful cold atoms, we show that the FF state can emerge in spinless Fermi gases confined in optical lattice associated with nearest-neighbor interactions. The mechanism of the spinless FF state relies on the split Fermi surfaces by tuning the chemistry potential, which naturally gives rise to finite-momentum Cooper pairings. The phase transition is accompanied by changed Chern n…
In a trapped atomic Fermi gas, one can tune continuously via a Feshbach resonance the effective pairing interaction between fermionic atoms from very weak to very strong. As a consequence, the low temperature superfluidity evolves continuously from the BCS type in the weak interaction limit to that of Bose-Einstein condensation in the strong pairing limit, exhibiting a BCS-BEC crossover. In this paper, we review recent experimental progress in atomic Fermi gases which elucidates the nature of the superfluid phase as the interaction is continuously tuned. Of particular interest is the intermedi…
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.
Tuning interactions in the spin singlet and quintet channels of two colliding atoms could change the symmetry of the one-dimensional spin-3/2 fermionic systems of ultracold atoms while preserving the integrability. Here we find a novel $SO(4)$ symmetry integrable point in thespin-3/2 Fermi gas and derive the exact solution of the model using the Bethe ansatz. In contrast to the model with $SU(4)$ and $SO(5)$ symmetries, the present model with $SO(4)$ symmetry preserves spin singlet and quintet Cooper pairs in two sets of $SU(2)\otimes SU(2)$ spin subspaces. We obtain full phase diagrams, inclu…
The ground-state phase diagram of attractively-interacting Fermi gases in two dimensions with a population imbalance is investigated. We find the regime of stability for the Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) phase, in which pairing occurs at finite wave vector, and determine the magnitude of the pairing amplitude $Δ$ and FFLO wavevector $q$ in the ordered phase, finding that $Δ$ can be of the order of the two-body binding energy. Our results rely on a careful analysis of the zero temperature gap equation for the FFLO state, which possesses nonanalyticities as a function of $Δ$ and $q$, i…
We explore the ground states in population-imbalanced attractive 1-D fermionic optical lattice filling $p$ orbitals over the lowest $s$ one by using the density-matrix-renormalization-group (DMRG) method. The DMRG calculations find the occurrence of spatially non-uniform off-diagonal long-range order. In contrast to Fulde-Ferrel Larkin-Ovchinikov pair as observed in the single-band Hubbard model. The spatial oscillation period of the pair correlation function is widely fixed to be $π$ irrespective of the mismatch between spin-split Fermi surfaces. The ground-state $π$ order corresponds to $η$-…
Recent experiments on fermions in synthetic gauge fields result in systems with a spin-orbit coupling along one spatial axis, a detuning field, and a Zeeman field. We show theoretically that the presence of all three results in interesting and unusual phenomena in such systems in the presence of a contact singlet attraction between the fermions (described by a scattering length). For two particles, bound states appear over certain range of the centre of mass momenta when a critical positive scattering length is attained, with the deepest bound state appearing at a nonzero centre of mass moment…
We address the phase of a highly polarized Fermi gas across a narrow Feshbach resonance starting from the problem of a single down spin fermion immersed in a Fermi sea of up spins. Both polaron and pairing states are considered using the variational wave function approach, and we find that the polaron to pairing transition will take place at the BCS side of the resonance, strongly in contrast to a wide resonance where the transition is located at the BEC side. For pairing phase, we find out the critical strength of repulsive interaction between pairs above which the mixture of pairs and fermio…
We study the ground state phase diagram of population balanced and imbalanced ultracold atomic Fermi gases with a short range attractive interaction throughout the crossover from BCS to Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC), in a two-dimensional optical lattice (2DOL) comprised of two lattice and one continuum dimensions. We find that the mixing of lattice and continuum dimensions, together with population imbalance, has an extraordinary effect on pairing and the superfluidity of atomic Fermi gases. In the balanced case, the superfluid ground state prevails the majority of the phase space. However,…
In this paper, we study the effect of population imbalance and its interplay with pairing strength and lattice effect in atomic Fermi gases in a one-dimensional optical lattice. We compute various phase diagrams as the system undergoes BCS-BEC crossover, using the same pairing fluctuation theory as in Part I. We find widespread pseudogap phenomena beyond the BCS regime and intermediate temperature superfluid states for relatively low population imbalances. The Fermi surface topology plays an important role in the behavior of $T_\text{c}$. For large $d$ and/or small $t$, which yield an open Fer…
We have studied the exotic superfluid phases of degenerated Fermi gases with spin-orbit coupling in a mixed dimensional system, where the motion of atoms are free in the x-direction and the tunneling between nearest tubes in the y-direction is permitted. Using the mean-field method, we obtain the phase diagrams of the system during the dimensional crossover between quasi one dimension to quasi two dimension. We find the existence of the topological state and Majorana edge mode in the weak tunneling case, and a rich phase diagram including two kinds of nodal superfluid phase and gapped superflu…
We consider a cold two-species atomic Fermi gas confined in a trap. We combine the Hermitian coupling between the states (we assume them to be the states with different spins) with the Cooper pairing of atoms with these different spins. This opens up a new prospect for investigation of interplay between various phenomena involving Raman coupling (e.g., atom lasers, dark-state polaritons) and effects caused by Cooper pairing of particles (e.g., superfluidity). We have obtained a threshold of transition from oscillatory to amplifying behavior of matter waves.
Similar to what has recently been achieved with Bose-Bose mixtures [Lamporesi et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 153202 (2010)], mixed-dimensional Fermi-Fermi mixtures can be created by applying a species-selective one-dimensional optical lattice to a two-species Fermi gas ($σ\equiv \{\uparrow, \downarrow \}$), such a way that only one of the species feel the lattice potential and is confined to a quasi-two-dimensional geometry, while having negligible effect on the other, that is leaving it three dimensional. We investigate the ground state phase diagram of superfluidity for such mixtures in the B…
Recently, cold atomic Fermi gases with the large magnetic dipolar interaction have been laser cooled down to quantum degeneracy. Different from electric-dipoles which are classic vectors, atomic magnetic dipoles are quantum-mechanical matrix operators proportional to the hyperfine-spin of atoms, thus provide rich opportunities to investigate exotic many-body physics. Furthermore, unlike anisotropic electric dipolar gases, unpolarized magnetic dipolar systems are isotropic under simultaneous spin-orbit rotation. These features give rise to a robust mechanism for a novel pairing symmetry: orbita…
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…
The pairing and superfluid phenomena in a two-component ultracold atomic Fermi gas is an analogue of Cooper pairing and superconductivity in an electron system, in particular, the high $T_c$ superconductors. Owing to the various tunable parameters that have been made accessible experimentally in recent years, atomic Fermi gases can be explored as a prototype or quantum simulator of superconductors. It is hoped that, utilizing such an analogy, the study of atomic Fermi gases may shed light to the mysteries of high $T_c$ superconductivity. One obstacle to the ultimate understanding of high $T_c$…
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…
