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arXiv:0812.2395 · Physical Review A

Breached pairing in trapped three-color atomic Fermi gases

B. Errea, J. Dukelsky, Gerardo Ortíz

Published May 13, 2009• 26 citations
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Abstract

We introduce an exactly solvable model for trapped three-color atom gases. Application to a system of cigar-shaped trapped cold fermions reveals a complex structure of breached pairing phases. We find two competing superfluid phases at weak and intermediate couplings, each with two-color pair condensates that can be distinguished with density profile measurements.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.79.051603

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We introduce an exactly solvable model for trapped three-color atom gases. Application to a system of cigar-shaped trapped cold fermions reveals a complex structure of breached pairing phases. We find two competing superfluid phases at weak and intermediate couplings, each with two-color pair condensates that can be distinguished with density profile measurements.
We introduce an exactly solvable model to study the competition between the Larkin-Ovchinnikov-Fulde-Ferrell (LOFF) and breached-pair superfluid in strongly interacting ultracold asymmetric Fermi gases. One can thus investigate homogeneous and inhomogeneous states on equal footing and establish the quantum phase diagram. For certain values of the filling and the interaction strength, the model exhibits a new stable exotic pairing phase which combines an inhomogeneous state with an interior gap to pair excitations. It is proven that this phase is the exact ground state in the strong-coupling limit, while numerical examples in finite lattices show that also at finite interaction strength it can have lower energy than the breached-pair or LOFF states.
Superconductivity and superfluidity of fermions require, within the BCS theory, matching of the Fermi energies of the two interacting Fermion species. Difference in the number densities of the two species leads either to a normal state, to phase separation, or---potentially---to exotic forms of superfluidity such as Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) state, Sarma state, or breached pair state. We consider ultracold Fermi gases with polarization, i.e., spin-density imbalance. We show that, due to the gases being trapped and isolated from the environment in terms of particle exchange, exotic forms of superfluidity appear as a shell around the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superfluid core of the gas and, for large density imbalance, in the core as well. We obtain these results by describing the effect of the trapping potential by using the Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations. For comparison to experiments, we calculate also the condensate fraction, and show that, in the center of the trap, a polarized superfluid leads to a small dip in the central density difference. We compare the results to those given by local density approximation and find qualitatively different behavior.
In order to help detecting superfluidity, we theoretically investigate p-wave pairing superfluids in neutral Fermion atom gases confined by a three dimensimentional (3D) harmonic potential. The Ginzburg-Landau framework, which is generic for p-wave superfluids, is used to describe the order parameter spatial structure, or texture characterized by the l-vector both at rest and under rotation. The l-vector configuration is strongly contrained by the boundary condition due to a trap. It is found that the ground state textures exhibit spontaneous supercurrent at rest both cigar and pancake shape traps. The current direction depends on the trapping shape. Under rotation a pair of half-quantum vortex with half-winding number enters a system and is stabilized for both trap geometries. We give detailed explanation for their 3D structure. The deformations of the condensate shape are seen with increasing the rotation speed, which is tightly connected with the underlying vortex formation where the condensates are depressed in the vortex core.
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 6^66Li 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 three competing pairing tendencies with different non-zero center-of-mass momenta. At large attractive interactions the system exhibits strong tendencies towards collapse and phase separation. Employing the density-matrix-renormalization-group-method (DMRG) to determine the decay exponents of the various correlators we establish the phase diagram of this model for different fillings and interactions. We also discuss the experimentally relevant situation in a trap and report the existence of an additional region where two species are dynamically balanced.
In this chapter we review recent experimental and theoretical work on various novel superfluid phases in fermion systems, that result from pairing fermions of different species with unequal densities. After briefly reviewing existing experimental work in superconductors subject to a strong magnetic field and trapped cold fermionic atom systems, we discuss how to characterize the possible pairing phases based on their symmetry properties, and the structure/topology of the Fermi surface(s) formed by the unpaired fermions due to the density imbalance. We also discuss possible experimental probes that can be used to directly detect the structure of the superfluid order parameter in superconductors and trapped cold atom systems, which may establish the presence of some of these phases unambiguously.
We consider the BCS-BEC (Bose-Einstein-condensate) crossover for a system of trapped Fermi atoms at finite temperature, both below and above the superfluid critical temperature, by including fluctuations beyond mean field. We determine the superfluid critical temperature and the pair-breaking temperature as functions of the attractive interaction between Fermi atoms, from the weak- to the strong-coupling limit (where bosonic molecules form as bound-fermion pairs). Density profiles in the trap are also obtained for all temperatures and couplings.