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arXiv:0911.2487 · Bulletin of the American Physical Society

Mixing of Bose and Fermi Superfluids

B. Ramachandhran, Satyan Bhongale, Han Pu

Published Nov 12, 2009• 0 citations
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Abstract

Trapped ultra-cold atom experiments provide a unique opportunity to understand Bose-Fermi superfluid mixtures occurring in contrasting areas of physics. At present there are several atom-trap experiments that could potentially explore this superfluid-mixture regime, thus warranting a detailed understanding of the occurrence and stability of various possible thermodynamic phases in the mixture. In the present work, we therefore construct the finite temperature phase diagram of an interacting atomic mixture of Bose and Fermi superfluids. Our study reveals a unique region of phase space, where the BCS instability of the Fermi surface coincides with dynamical instability of the homogeneous mixture towards phase separation through a first-order transition. We illustrate how this intriguing interplay manifests in a trapped configuration, thereby providing important constraints for observing superfluidity in experiments.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.0911.2487

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Trapped ultra-cold atom experiments provide a unique opportunity to understand Bose-Fermi superfluid mixtures occurring in contrasting areas of physics. At present there are several atom-trap experiments that could potentially explore this superfluid-mixture regime, thus warranting a detailed understanding of the occurrence and stability of various possible thermodynamic phases in the mixture. In the present work, we therefore construct the finite temperature phase diagram of an interacting atomic mixture of Bose and Fermi superfluids. Our study reveals a unique region of phase space, where the BCS instability of the Fermi surface coincides with dynamical instability of the homogeneous mixture towards phase separation through a first-order transition. We illustrate how this intriguing interplay manifests in a trapped configuration, thereby providing important constraints for observing superfluidity in experiments.
Ultracold atom experiments offer the unique opportunity to study mixing of different types of superfluid states. Our interest is in superfluid mixtures comprising of particles with different statistics---Bose and Fermi. Such scenarios occur naturally, for example, in dense quantum chromodynamics (QCD) matter. Interestingly, cold atomic experiments are performed in traps with finite spatial extent, thus critically destabilizing the occurrence of various homogeneous phases. Critical to this analysis is the understanding that the trapped system can undergo phase separation, resulting in a unique situation where phase transition in either species (bosons or fermions) can overlap with the phase separation between possible phases. In the present work, we illustrate how this intriguing interplay manifests in an interacting two-species atomic mixture---one bosonic and another fermionic with two spin components---within a realistic trap configuration. We further show that such interplay of transitions can render the nature of the ground state to be highly sensitive to the experimental parameters and the dimensionality of the system.
The pairing and superfluid phenomena in a two-component Fermi gas can be strongly affected by the population and mass imbalances. Here we present phase diagrams of an atomic Fermi-Fermi mixture as they undergo BCS--Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) crossover using a pairing fluctuation theory. We focus on the finite temperature and trap effects, with an emphasis on the mixture of 6{}^{6}6Li and 40{}^{40}40K. We show that there exist exotic types of phase separation in the (near-)BEC regime, associated with a pseudogap effect. Moreover, in the BCS and unitary regimes, the spatial density and gap profiles exhibit sandwichlike shell structures with superfluid or pseudogapped normal state in the middle shell. Such a sandwichlike shell structure appears when the mass imbalance increases beyond a certain threshold. Our result is relevant to future experiments on the 6{}^{6}6Li-40{}^{40}40K and other possible Fermi-Fermi mixtures.
We investigate an ultracold Bose-Fermi mixture with a Feshbach resonance between two hyperfine states of fermions. Using a functional integral method, we calculate collective modes associated with fermion pairs and bosons in the superfluid phase. We derive a stability condition of the mixtures that is valid in the entire region of the BCS-BEC crossover. This stability condition, which smoothly connects the well-known results obtained in both the BCS and Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) limits, shows that sufficiently strong fermion-boson (FB) interactions destabilize the mixtures. In order to investigate the consequence of this instability, we study the ground-state energy of both the uniformly mixed and the phase-separated states. We find that FB repulsion induces a phase separation, whereas FB attraction should cause a collapse of the mixture. The possibilities for the experimental observation of such instabilities are also discussed.
Experimental realizations of a variety of atomic binary Bose-Fermi mixtures have brought opportunities for studying composite quantum systems with different spin statistics. The binary atomic mixtures can exhibit a structural transition from a mixture into phase separation as the boson-fermion interaction increases. By using a path-integral formalism to evaluate the grand partition function and the thermodynamic grand potential, we obtain the effective potential of binary Bose-Fermi mixtures. Thermodynamic quantities in a broad range of temperatures and interactions are also derived. The structural transition can be identified as a loop of the effective potential curve, and the volume fraction of phase separation can be determined by the lever rule. For $^{6}\mathrm{Li}\ensuremath{-}^{7}\mathrm{Li}$ and $^{6}\mathrm{Li}\ensuremath{-}^{41}\mathrm{K}$ mixtures, we present the phase diagrams of the mixtures in a box potential at zero and finite temperatures. Due to the flexible densities of atomic gases, the construction of phase separation is more complicated when compared to conventional liquid or solid mixtures where the individual densities are fixed. For harmonically trapped mixtures, we use the local density approximation to map out the finite-temperature density profiles and present typical trap structures, including the mixture, partially separated phases, and fully separated phases.
In this Rapid Communication a generalization of the BEC-BCS crossover theory to a multicomponent superfluid is presented by studying a three-species mixture of Fermi gas across two Feshbach resonances. At the BEC side of resonances, two kinds of molecules are stable which gives rise to a two-component Bose condensate. This two-component superfluid state can be experimentally identified from the radio-frequency spectroscopy, density profile, and short noise measurements. As approaching the BCS side of resonances, the superfluidity will break down at some point and yield a first-order quantum phase transition to normal state, due to the mismatch of three Fermi surfaces. Phase separation instability will occur around the critical regime.
The phase diagrams of low density Fermi-Fermi mixtures with equal or unequal masses and equal or unequal populations are described at zero and finite temperatures in the strong attraction limit. In this limit, the Fermi-Fermi mixture can be described by a weakly interacting Bose-Fermi mixture, where the bosons correspond to Feshbach molecules and the fermions correspond to excess atoms. First, we discuss the three and four fermion scattering processes, and use the exact boson-fermion and boson-boson scattering lengths to generate the phase diagrams in terms of the underlying fermion-fermion scattering length. In three dimensions, in addition to the normal and uniform superfluid phases, we find two stable nonuniform states corresponding to (i) phase separation between pure unpaired (excess) and pure paired fermions (molecular bosons); and (ii) phase separation between pure excess fermions and a mixture of excess fermions and molecular bosons. Lastly, we also discuss the effects of the trapping potential in the density profiles of condensed and noncondensed molecular bosons, and excess fermions at zero and finite temperatures, and discuss possible implications of our findings to experiments involving mixtures of ultracold fermions.