We investigate the Zeeman field effects on the bulk superfluid properties and the collective modes in two-dimensional (2D) attractive atomic Fermi gases with Rashba-type spin-orbit coupling. In the presence of a large spin-orbit coupling, the system undergoes a quantum phase transition to a topological superfluid state at a critical Zeeman field. We show that the nonanalyticities of the thermodynamic functions as well as other physical quantities at the quantum phase transition originate from the infrared singularities caused by the gapless fermionic spectrum. The same argument applies also to the BCS-BEC evolution in 2D fermionic superfluids with
p- or
d-wave pairing. The superfluid density
ns and the velocity of the Goldstone sound mode
cs behave oppositely in the normal and the topological superfluid phases: they are suppressed by the Zeeman field in the normal superfluid phase, but get enhanced in the topological superfluid phase. The velocity of the Goldstone sound mode also shows nonanalyticity at the quantum phase transition. For large Zeeman field, we find ${n}_{s}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}n$ and ${c}_{s}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}{\ensuremath{\upsilon}}_{\mathrm{F}}$, where
n is the total fermion density and ${\ensuremath{\upsilon}}_{\mathrm{F}}$ is the Fermi velocity of noninteracting system. The unusual behavior of the superfluid density and the collective modes can be understood by the fact that the spin-orbit-coupled superfluid state at large Zeeman field can be mapped to the
px+ipy superfluid state of spinless fermions.
By calculating the dynamical structure factor of the two-dimensional doped attractive Fermi-Hubbard model with Rashba spin-orbit coupling (SOC), we not only investigate collective modes and single-particle excitations of the system during the phase transition between the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer superfluid and topological superfluid, but also propose a universal method to measure the pairing gap in an optical lattice system. Our numerical results show that the area of the molecular excitation peak at the transferred momentum $\mathbf{q}=[\ensuremath{\pi},\ensuremath{\pi}]$ is proportional to the square of the pairing gap in the system with Rashba SOC. In particular, this method is very sensitive to the pairing gap. We verify that this method is universal to measure the pairing gap in a doped optical lattice with Rashba SOC. These theoretical results are important for experimentally measuring the pairing gap and studying the topological superfluid in an optical lattice.