We leverage random phase approximation and unbiased auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo methods to compute dynamical correlations for a dilute homogeneous two-dimensional attractive Fermi gas. Our main purpose is to quantitatively study the collective excitations of the system to generate robust benchmark results and to shed light into fermionic superfluidity in the strongly correlated regime. In particular we are motivated by a recent paper suggesting that the Higgs mode can be detected in the spectrum of spin fluctuations. Despite the fact that we are somewhat limited by finite-size effects, our study pinpoints indeed a clear peak in the spin channel at low momentum, but a detailed analysis suggests that such a peak, though certainly interesting, does not correspond to the Higgs mode. We propose a different explanation for the shape of the spin structure factor. On the other hand, our results clearly show that the Higgs mode can be detected in the density channel at very small wave vectors, although very good resolution is necessary.
Understanding novel pairings in attractive degenerate Fermi gases is crucial for exploring rich superfluid physics. In this report, we reveal unconventional pairings induced by spin-orbit coupling (SOC) in a one-dimensional optical lattice, using a state-of-the-art density-matrix renormalization group method. When both bands are partially occupied, we find a strong competition between the interband Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) and intraband Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) pairings. In particular, for the weak and moderate SOC strengths, these two pairings can coexist, giving rise to…
We have studied quasi one-dimensional few-particle systems consisting of one to six ultracold fermionic atoms in two different spin states with attractive interactions. We probe the system by deforming the trapping potential and by observing the tunneling of particles out of the trap. For even particle numbers we observe a tunneling behavior which deviates from uncorrelated single-particle tunneling indicating the existence of pair correlations in the system. From the tunneling timescales we infer the differences in interaction energies of systems with different number of particles which show …
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 study a strongly attractive system of a few spin-1/2 fermions confined in a one-dimensional harmonic trap, interacting via two-body contact potential. Performing exact diagonalization of the Hamiltonian we analyze the ground state and the thermal state of the system in terms of one-- and two--particle reduced density matrices. We show how for strong attraction the correlated pairs emerge in the system. We find that the fraction of correlated pairs depends on temperature and we show that this dependence has universal properties analogous to the gap function known from the theory of supercond…
Using solutions of the discrete Bethe ansatz equations, we study in detail the quantum impurity problem of a spin-down fermion immersed into a fully ploarized spin-up Fermi sea with weak attraction. We prove that this impurity fermion in the one-dimensional (1D) fermionic medium behaves like a polaron for weak attraction. However, as the attraction grows, the spin-down fermion binds with one spin-up fermion from the fully-polarized medium to form a tightly bond molecule. Thus it is seen that the system undergos a cross-over from a mean field polaron-like nature into a mixture of excess fermion…
We present a detailed study of the population imbalanced three-component Hubbard chain with attractive interactions. Such a system can be realized experimentally with three different hyperfine states of ultra cold $^6$Li atoms in an optical lattice. We find that there are different phases that compete with each other in this system: A molecular superfluid phase in which the three fermion species pair up to form molecules (trions), a usual pairing phase involving two species with exactly opposite momenta, and a more exotic generalized Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) phase consisting of …
As a means of realizing oscillatory pairing between fermions, we study superfluid pairing between two fermion "spin" species that are confined to adjustable spin-dependent trapping potentials. Focusing on the one-dimensional limit, we find that with increasing separation between the spin-dependent traps the fermions exhibit distinct phases, including a fully paired phase, a spin-imbalanced phase with oscillatory pairing, and an unpaired fully spin-polarized phase. We obtain the phase diagram of fermions in such a spin-split trap and discuss signatures of these phases in cold-atom experiments.
Dynamical structure factor and a new method to measure the pairing gap in two-dimensional attractive Fermi-Hubbard model
Centre for Theoretical and Computational Physics, College of Physics, Qingdao University（青岛大学物理学院理论计算物理中心）；School of Physics and Astronomy, Beijing Normal University（北京师范大学物理与天文学院）
We describe a model of dynamic Bose-Einstein condensates near a Feshbach resonance that is computationally feasible under assumptions of spherical or cylindrical symmetry. Simulations in spherical symmetry approximate the experimentally measured time to collapse of an unstably attractive condensate only when the molecular binding energy in the model is correct, demonstrating that the quantum fluctuations and atom-molecule pairing included in the model are the dominant mechanisms during collapse. Simulations of condensates with repulsive interactions find some quantitative disagreement, suggest…
We consider a mixture of two neutral cold Fermi gases with repulsive interactions. We show that in some region of the parameter space of the system the effective attraction between fermions of the same type can appear due to the exchange of collective excitations. This leads to the formation of BCS pairing in the case where bare inter-atomic interactions are repulsive.
Correlation properties in ultracold Fermi gas with negative scattering length and its impact on the three-body recombination is analyzed. We find that Cooper pairing enhances the recombination rate in contrast to the decrease of this rate accompanying Bose-Einstein condensation in a Bose gas. This trend is characteristic for all interval of temperatures T<Tc.
We study by diagrammatic methods a mixture of single-component bosons and fermions, with boson-fermion coupling tuned by a Fano-Feshbach resonance. For increasing coupling, the growing boson-fermion pairing correlations progressively reduce the boson condensation temperature and make it eventually vanish at a critical coupling. Such quantum critical point depends very weakly on the population imbalance and for vanishing boson densities coincides with that found for the polaron-molecule transition in a strongly imbalanced Fermi gas, thus bridging two quite distinct physical systems.
It is known from the solution of the two-body problem that an anisotropic dipolar interaction can give rise to s-wave scattering resonances, which are named as dipolar interaction induced resonaces (DIIR). In this letter, we study zero-temperature many-body physics of a two-component Fermi gas across a DIIR. In the low-density regime, it is very striking that the resulting pairing order parameter is a nearly isotropic singlet pairing and the physics can be well described by an s-wave resonant interaction potential with finite range corrections, despite of the anisotropic nature of dipolar inte…
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 $η$-…
We analyze paired phases of cold bosonic atoms with the hyper spin S=1 and with an attractive interaction. We derive mean-field self-consistent equations for the matrix order parameter describing such paired bosons on an optical lattice. The possible solutions are classified according to their symmetries. In particular, we find that the self-consistent equations for the SO(3) symmetric phase are of the same form as those for the scalar bosons with the attractive interaction. This singlet phase may exhibit either the BCS type pairing instability (BCS phase) or the BEC quasiparticle condensation…
Ever since the pioneering work of Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer in the 1950s, exploring novel pairing mechanisms for fermion superfluids has become one of the central tasks in modern physics. Here, we investigate a new type of fermion superfluid with hybridized $s$- and $p$-wave pairings in an ultracold spin-1/2 Fermi gas. Its occurrence is facilitated by the co-existence of comparable $s$- and $p$-wave interactions, which is realizable in a two-component $^{40}$K Fermi gas with close-by $s$- and $p$-wave Feshbach resonances. The hybridized superfluid state is stable over a considerable param…
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 $N$.
We study the condensed phase of a Bose-Fermi mixture with a tunable pairing interaction between bosons and fermions with many-body diagrammatic methods and fixed-node diffusion Quantum Monte Carlo simulations. A universal behavior of the condensate fraction and bosonic momentum distribution with respect to the boson concentration is found to hold in an extended range of boson-fermion couplings and concentrations. For vanishing boson density, we prove that the bosonic condensate fraction reduces to the quasiparticle weight Z of the Fermi polaron studied in the context of polarized Fermi gases, …
We demonstrate that a kind of highly excited state of strongly attractive Hubbard model, named of Fermi super-Tonks-Girardeau state, can be realized in the spin-1/2 Fermi optical lattice system by a sudden switch of interaction from the strongly repulsive regime to the strongly attractive regime. In contrast to the ground state of the attractive Hubbard model, such a state is the lowest scattering state with no pairing between attractive fermions. With the aid of Bethe-ansatz method, we calculate energies of both the Fermi Tonks-Girardeau gas and the Fermi super-Tonks-Girardeau state of spin-1…
We consider finite-momentum pairing of superfluid phase in ultracold Fermi gas with spin-orbit coupling when subjected to an effective Zeeman field. Based on our two body and mean field many body calculations, we show that the Fulde-Ferrell type superfluid dominates in zero and finite temperature phase diagram. We examine the origin and properties of this novel phase systematically.
We investigate the specific heat $C_V$ at constant volume in the normal state of a $p$-wave interacting Fermi gas. Including $p$-wave pairing fluctuations within the strong-coupling theory developed by Nozières and Schmitt-Rink, we show that, in the weak-coupling side, $C_V$ exhibits a dip-hump behavior as a function of the temperature. While the dip is associated with the pseudogap phenomenon near $T_{\rm c}$, the hump structure is found to come from the suppression of Fermi quasiparticle scattering into a $p$-wave molecular state in the Fermi degenerate regime. Since the latter phenomenon do…
We follow the evolution of fermion pairing in the dimensional crossover from 3D to 2D as a strongly interacting Fermi gas of $^6$Li atoms becomes confined to a stack of two-dimensional layers formed by a one-dimensional optical lattice. Decreasing the dimensionality leads to the opening of a gap in radio-frequency spectra, even on the BCS-side of a Feshbach resonance. The measured binding energy of fermion pairs closely follows the theoretical two-body binding energy and, in the 2D limit, the zero-temperature mean-field BEC-BCS theory.
"Bottom-up" approaches to the many-body physics of fermions have demonstrated recently precise number and site-resolved preparations with tunability of interparticle interactions in single-well, SW, and double-well, DW, nano-scale confinements created by manipulating ultracold fermionic atoms with optical tweezers. These experiments emulate an analogue-simulator mapping onto the requisite microscopic hamiltonian, approaching realization of Feynman's vision of quantum simulators that "will do exactly the same as nature". Here we report on exact benchmark configuration-interaction computational …
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 …
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.
We systematically generalize the exotic $^3$He-B phase, which not only exhibits unconventional symmetry but is also isotropic and topologically non-trivial, to arbitrary partial-wave channels with multi-component fermions. The concrete example with four-component fermions is illustrated including the isotropic $f$, $p$ and $d$-wave pairings in the spin septet, triplet, and quintet channels, respectively. The odd partial-wave channel pairings are topologically non-trivial, while pairings in even partial-wave channels are topologically trivial. The topological index reaches the largest value of …
We show how dissipative dynamics can give rise to pairing for two-component fermions on a lattice. In particular, we construct a "parent" Liouvillian operator so that a BCS-type state of a given symmetry, e.g. a d-wave state, is reached for arbitrary initial states in the absence of conservative forces. The system-bath couplings describe single-particle, number conserving and quasi-local processes. The pairing mechanism crucially relies on Fermi statistics. We show how such Liouvillians can be realized via reservoir engineering with cold atoms representing a driven dissipative dynamics.
We observe many-body pairing in a two-dimensional gas of ultracold fermionic atoms at temperatures far above the critical temperature for superfluidity. For this, we use spatially resolved radio-frequency spectroscopy to measure pairing energies spanning a wide range of temperatures and interaction strengths. In the strongly interacting regime where the scattering length between fermions is on the same order as the inter-particle spacing, the pairing energy in the normal phase significantly exceeds the intrinsic two-body binding energy of the system and shows a clear dependence on local densit…
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…
Fermion systems with flat bands can boost superconductivity by enhancing the density of states at the Fermi level. We use quasiexact numerical methods to show that repulsive interactions between spinless fermions in a one-dimensional (1D) flat-band system, the Creutz ladder, give a finite pairing energy that increases with repulsion, though charge quasi-order (QO) remains dominant. Adding an attractive component shifts the balance in favor of superconductivity and the interplay of two flat bands further yields a remarkable enhancement of superconductivity, well outside of known paradigms for 1…
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…
We investigate the effects of pairing fluctuations in fermionic superfluids/superconductors where pairing occurs among three species (colors) of fermions. Such color superfluids/superconductors can be realized in three-component atomic Fermi gases and in dense quark matter. The superfluidity/superconductivity is characterized by a three-component order parameter which denotes the pairing among the three colors of fermions. Due to the SU$(3)$ symmetry of the Hamiltonian, one color does not participate pairing. This branch of fermionic excitation is gapless in the naive BCS mean-field descriptio…
Interacting Fermi gases with spin-orbit coupling are responsible for many intriguing phenomena such as topological superfluids and Majorana fermions. Here we characterize theoretically fermionic pairing in a strongly interacting spin-orbit coupled Fermi gas, by using momentum-resolved radio-frequency spectroscopy. We develop a strong-coupling $T$-matrix theory and present a phase diagram near the unitary resonance limit. A smooth transition from atomic to molecular responses in the momentum-resolved spectroscopy is predicted, with a clear signature of anisotropic pairing at and below resonance…
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.
The rapid experimental progress of ultra-cold dipolar fermions opens up a whole new opportunity to investigate novel many-body physics of fermions. In this article, we review theoretical studies of the Fermi liquid theory and Cooper pairing instabilities of both electric and magnetic dipolar fermionic systems from the perspective of unconventional symmetries. When the electric dipole moments are aligned by the external electric field, their interactions exhibit the explicit $d_{r^2-3z^2}$ anisotropy. The Fermi liquid properties, including the single-particle spectra, thermodynamic susceptibili…
We use unbiased computational methods to elucidate the onset and properties of pair superfluidity in two-species fermionic and bosonic systems with onsite interspecies attraction loaded in one-dimensional optical lattice. We compare results from quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) and density matrix renormalization group (DMRG), emphasizing the one-to-one correspondence between the Drude weight tensor, calculated with DMRG, and the various winding numbers extracted from the QMC. Our results show that, for any nonvanishing attractive interaction, pairs form and are the sole contributors to superfluidity,…
We study the pairing dynamics of polar states in a single species p-wave superfluid Fermi gas following a sudden change of the interaction strength. The anisotropy of pair interaction together with the presence of the centrifugal barrier results in profoundly different pairing dynamics compared to the s-wave case. Depending on the direction of quenches, quench to the BCS regime results in a large oscillatory depletion of momentum occupation inside the Fermi sea or a large filling of momentum occupation. We elucidate a crucial role of the resonant state supported by the centrifugal barrier in t…
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 …
In this paper we address the behavior of the superfluid transition temperature $T_c$ in the attractive Hubbard model. We study systematically the effects of pairing fluctuations and address all filling fractions over the entire range of attractive interaction strength. While the attractive Hubbard model can be regarded as the generalization of BCS to Bose Einstein condensation (BEC) crossover to a lattice, we find that the BEC limit of this Hubbard model is very different from that of jellium, owing to the strong inter-site repulsion between pairs, which becomes important near half filling whe…
We theoretically investigate in-medium two- and three-body correlations in one-dimensional two-component Fermi gases with coexistent even-parity s-wave and odd-parity p-wave interactions. We find the solutions of the stable in-medium three-body cluster states such as Cooper triple by solving the corresponding in-medium variational equations. We further feature the phase diagram consisting of the s- and p-wave Cooper pairing phase, and Cooper tripling phase, in the plane of s- and p-wave pairing strengths. The Cooper tripling phase dominates over the pairing phases when both s- and p-wave inter…
