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arXiv:0704.2957 · Physical Review Letters

Superfluid-Insulator Transition of Strongly Interacting Fermi Gases in Optical Lattices

Hui Zhai, Tin-Lun Ho

Published Sep 7, 2007• 55 citations
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Abstract

We study a quantum phase transition between fermion superfluid (SF) and band insulator (BI) of fermions in optical lattices. The destruction of the band insulator is driven by the energy gain in promoting fermions from valance band to various conducting bands to form Cooper pairs. We show that the transition must take place in lattice height Vo/ER between 2.23 and 4.14. The latter is the prediction of mean-field theory while the former is the value for opening a band gap. As one moves across resonance to the molecule side, the SF-BI transition evolves into the SF-Mott-insulator transition of bosonic molecules. We shall also present the global phase diagram for SF-insulator transition for the BCS-BEC family.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.99.100402

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We study a quantum phase transition between fermion superfluid (SF) and band insulator (BI) of fermions in optical lattices. The destruction of the band insulator is driven by the energy gain in promoting fermions from valance band to various conducting bands to form Cooper pairs. We show that the transition must take place in lattice height Vo/ER between 2.23 and 4.14. The latter is the prediction of mean-field theory while the former is the value for opening a band gap. As one moves across resonance to the molecule side, the SF-BI transition evolves into the SF-Mott-insulator transition of bosonic molecules. We shall also present the global phase diagram for SF-insulator transition for the BCS-BEC family.
We study the multiband superfluid (SF) and the SF to band-insulator transition of strongly interacting fermionic atoms in an optical lattice at a filling of two fermions per well. We present physical arguments to show that a consistent mean-field description of this problem is obtained by retaining only intraband pairing between the fermions. Using this approach we obtain a reasonable account of the experimentally observed critical lattice depth for the SF-BI transition and the modulated components of the condensate density and make predictions for the lattice depth dependence of the quasiparticle gap which can be tested in future experiments. We also highlight some interesting features unique to cold atom superfluids within this intraband pairing approximation; for instance, the pair field is forced to be uniform in space and the Hartree field vanishes identically. These arise as a result of the fact that while the pairing interaction is cut off at the scale of the Debye frequency in conventional superconductors or at the lattice scale in tight-binding model Hamiltonians, such a cutoff is absent for cold Fermi gases.
We study two models realized by two-component Fermi gases loaded in optical lattices. We clarify that multiband effects inevitably caused by the optical lattices generate a rich structure, when the systems crossover from the region of weakly bound molecular bosons to the region of strongly bound atomic bosons. Here the crossover can be controlled by attractive fermion interaction. One of the present models is a case with attractive fermion interaction, where an insulator-superfluid transition takes place. The transition is characterized as the transition between a band insulator and a Bose-Einstein condensate superfluid state. Differing from the conventional Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superfluid transition, this transition shows unconventional properties. In contrast to the one-particle excitation gap scaled by the superfluid order parameter in the conventional BCS transition, because of the multiband effects, a large gap of one-particle density of states is retained all through the transition, although the superfluid order grows continuously from zero. A re-entrant transition with lowering temperature is another unconventionality. The other model is the case with coexisting attractive and repulsive interactions. Within a mean-field treatment, we find a new insulating state, an orbital ordered insulator. This insulator is one candidate for the Mott insulator of molecular bosons and is the first example that the orbital internal degrees of freedom of molecular bosons appears explicitly. Besides the emergence of a new phase, a coexisting phase also appears where superfluidity and an orbital order coexist just by doping holes or particles. The insulating and superfluid particles show differentiation in momentum space as in the high-Tc{T}_{\text{c}}Tc​ cuprate superconductors.
We study the 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 a 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 nonmonotonic dependence of the chemical potential on detuning and the concomitant Cooper-pair or molecular size, larger in the BCS and smaller in the BEC regimes. For a single filled band we find a quantum phase transition from a band insulator to a BCS-BEC superfluid, and map out the corresponding phase diagram.
We study the superfluid--Mott insulator (SF-MI) transition of spin-1 bosons interacting antiferromagnetically in an optical lattice. Starting from a Bose-Hubbard tight-binding model for spin-1 bosons, we obtain the zero-temperature phase diagram by a mean-field approximation. We find that the MI phase with an even number of atoms per site is a spin singlet state, while the MI phase with an odd number of atoms per site has spin 1 at each site in the limit of t=0t=0t=0, where ttt is the hopping matrix element. We also show that the superfluid phase is a polar state as in the case for a spin-1 Bose condensate in a harmonic trap. It is found that the MI phase is strongly stabilized against the SF-MI transition when the number of atoms per site is even, due to the formation of singlet pairs. We derive the effective spin Hamiltonian for the MI phase with one atom per site and briefly discuss the spin order in the MI phase.
The superfluid-insulator transition of fermionic atoms in optical lattices is investigated by two-site dynamical mean-field theory. It is shown that the Mott transition occurs as a result of multiband effects. The quasiparticle weight in the superfluid state decreases significantly as the system approaches the Mott transition point. By changing the interaction and the orbital splitting, we obtain the phase diagram at half filling. The numerical results are discussed in comparison with the effective boson model.