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arXiv:1310.0211 · Physical Review A

Inhomogeneous BCS-BEC crossover for trapped cold atoms in optical lattices

A. Amaricci, A. Privitera, Massimo Capone

Published May 7, 2014• 19 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The BCS-BEC (Bose-Einstein condensation) crossover in a lattice is a powerful paradigm that describes how a superconductor deviates from the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer physics as the attractive interaction increases. Optical lattices loaded with binary mixtures of cold atoms allow one to access this phenomenon experimentally in a clean and controlled way. We show that, however, the possibility to study this phenomenon in actual cold-atoms experiments is limited by the effect of the trapping potential. Real-space dynamical mean-field theory calculations show indeed that interactions and the confining potential conspire to pack the fermions in the center of the trap, which approaches a band insulator when the attraction becomes sizeable. Interestingly, the energy gap is spatially more homogeneous than the superfluid condensate order parameter. We show how this physics reflects in several observables, and we propose an alternative strategy to disentangle the effect of the harmonic potential and measure the intrinsic properties resulting from the interaction strength.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.89.053604

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The BCS-BEC (Bose-Einstein condensation) crossover in a lattice is a powerful paradigm that describes how a superconductor deviates from the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer physics as the attractive interaction increases. Optical lattices loaded with binary mixtures of cold atoms allow one to access this phenomenon experimentally in a clean and controlled way. We show that, however, the possibility to study this phenomenon in actual cold-atoms experiments is limited by the effect of the trapping potential. Real-space dynamical mean-field theory calculations show indeed that interactions and the confining potential conspire to pack the fermions in the center of the trap, which approaches a band insulator when the attraction becomes sizeable. Interestingly, the energy gap is spatially more homogeneous than the superfluid condensate order parameter. We show how this physics reflects in several observables, and we propose an alternative strategy to disentangle the effect of the harmonic potential and measure the intrinsic properties resulting from the interaction strength.
Confined ultracold atoms in optical lattices provide a versatile platform for simulating lattice models of strongly correlated quantum systems, where pairing phenomena and superfluid phases can be explored under controlled conditions. While the crossover between the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) phase and the Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) is well understood in homogeneous systems, spatial confinement breaks translational symmetry and reshapes correlation patterns, making the BCS-BEC identification in trapped geometries challenging and allowing unconventional phases to emerge with no direct analog in homogeneous systems. Here we present a characterization of the BCS-BEC crossover in harmonically confined one-dimensional Fermi-Hubbard chains. Our analysis combines Density Matrix Renormalization Group (DMRG) simulations and entanglement-based diagnostics with effective models describing the formation of tightly bound fermion pairs. This combined approach enables a detailed understanding of how the interplay between interactions and confinement reshapes the crossover, leading to insulating regions coexisting with persistent superfluid correlations. Within this framework, we further introduce conditioned correlation functions whose power-law decay allows a clear distinction between BCS-like and BEC-like regimes. The consistency between the effective descriptions and the numerical DMRG results yields a unified picture of the crossover in harmonically confined geometries.
We present a theory of a two-component atomic Fermi gas with tunable attractive contact interactions on a spherical shell going through the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS)--Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) crossover, inspired by the realizations of spherical bubble traps for ultracold atoms in microgravity. The derivation follows the BCS-Leggett theory to obtain the gap and number equations. The BCS-BEC crossover can be induced by tuning the interaction, and the properly normalized gap and chemical potential exhibit universal behavior regardless of the planar or spherical geometry. Nevertheless, the spherical-shell geometry introduces another way of inducing the crossover by the curvature. The curvature-induced BCS-BEC crossover is made possible by fixing the particle number and interaction strength while shrinking the sphere, causing a reduction to the ratio of the pairing and kinetic energies and pushing the system toward the BCS limit. The saturation of the superfluid density further confirms that the ground state is a Fermi superfluid.
This thesis presents a theoretical study of Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) and Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) pairing states in inhomogeneous systems of cold atoms and of electrons. Features of spatially separated phases are explored, with particular focus on the behavior of the condensed phase and its experimental measures. Three specific systems are addressed below. First, we study bosonic atoms in three-dimensional optical lattices in the presence of an external spherical harmonic trapping potential. We investigate the critical value associated with the lattice depth and interaction strength below which the system undergoes a quantum phase transition from a global BEC phase to a coexistence of local BEC and Mott-insulating phases. We discuss the ground state properties, excitations, and experimental signatures of the condensate surrounded by the Mott-insulators. BCS pairing in fermionic atoms of two spin species that are confined to spatially separated trapping potentials is investigated next. We investigate the one-dimensional limit and find that, with increasing separation between the spin-dependent traps, the fermions undergo a transition from a global fully-paired phase to a coexistence of a fully-paired phase, a spin-imbalanced phase with oscillatory pairing, the so-called Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) state, and an unpaired completely spin-polarized phase. We present numerical profiles of key parameters of the phase diagram as well as observable signatures of the oscillatory pairing phase. The third topic is that of transport physics in a superconductor-ferromagnetic-metal (S/F) hybrid in which superconducting phases and ferromagnetic normal phases are artificially combined. We model the interface between the S and F regions and discuss possible scattering processes at the interface. We apply the Blonder-Tinkham-Klapwijk treatment with the interfacial model to calculate resistance of the system. These results explain recent experimental observations.
We investigate the crossover from the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) state of weakly bound Cooper pairs to the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of strongly bound molecular dimers in a gas of ultracold atoms loaded on a two-dimensional optical lattice. By using the mean-field BCS equations of the emerging Hubbard model and the concept of off-diagonal long-range order for fermions we calculate analytically and numerically the pair binding energy, the energy gap, and the condensate fraction of Cooper pairs as a function of interaction strength and filling factor of atoms in the lattice at zero temperature.
We investigate the crossover from Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superfluidity to Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) in a two-dimensional Fermi gas at T = 0 using the fixed-node diffusion Monte Carlo method. We calculate the equation of state and the gap parameter as a function of the interaction strength, observing large deviations compared to mean-field predictions. In the BEC regime our results show the important role of dimer-dimer and atom-dimer interaction effects that are completely neglected in the mean-field picture. We also consider the highly polarized gas and the competition between a polaronic and a molecular picture.
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.