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arXiv:1408.6511 · Physical Review A

Moving solitons in a one-dimensional fermionic superfluid

Dmitry K. Efimkin, Victor M. Galitski

Published Feb 17, 2015• 27 citations
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Abstract

A fully analytical theory of a traveling soliton in a one-dimensional fermionic superfluid is developed within the framework of time-dependent self-consistent Bogoliubov--de Gennes equations, which are solved exactly in the Andreev approximation. The soliton manifests itself in a kinklike profile of the superconducting order parameter and hosts a pair of Andreev bound states in its core. They adjust to the soliton's motion and play an important role in its stabilization. A phase jump across the soliton and its energy decrease with the soliton's velocity and vanish at the critical velocity, corresponding to the Landau criterion, where the soliton starts emitting quasiparticles and becomes unstable. The ``inertial'' and ``gravitational'' masses of the soliton are calculated and the former is shown to be orders of magnitude larger than the latter. This results in a slow motion of the soliton in a harmonic trap, reminiscent of the observed behavior of a solitonlike texture in related experiments in cold fermion gases [T. Yefsah et al., Nature (London) 499, 426 (2013)]. Furthermore, we calculate the full nonlinear dispersion relation of the soliton and solve the classical equations of motion in a trap. The strong nonlinearity at high velocities gives rise to anharmonic oscillatory motion of the soliton. A careful analysis of this anharmonicity may provide a means to experimentally measure the nonlinear soliton spectrum in superfluids.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.91.023616

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A fully analytical theory of a traveling soliton in a one-dimensional fermionic superfluid is developed within the framework of time-dependent self-consistent Bogoliubov--de Gennes equations, which are solved exactly in the Andreev approximation. The soliton manifests itself in a kinklike profile of the superconducting order parameter and hosts a pair of Andreev bound states in its core. They adjust to the soliton's motion and play an important role in its stabilization. A phase jump across the soliton and its energy decrease with the soliton's velocity and vanish at the critical velocity, corresponding to the Landau criterion, where the soliton starts emitting quasiparticles and becomes unstable. The inertial'' and gravitational'' masses of the soliton are calculated and the former is shown to be orders of magnitude larger than the latter. This results in a slow motion of the soliton in a harmonic trap, reminiscent of the observed behavior of a solitonlike texture in related experiments in cold fermion gases [T. Yefsah et al., Nature (London) 499, 426 (2013)]. Furthermore, we calculate the full nonlinear dispersion relation of the soliton and solve the classical equations of motion in a trap. The strong nonlinearity at high velocities gives rise to anharmonic oscillatory motion of the soliton. A careful analysis of this anharmonicity may provide a means to experimentally measure the nonlinear soliton spectrum in superfluids.
We investigate traveling solitons of a one- or two-dimensional spin-orbit-coupled Fermi superfluid in both topologically trivial and nontrivial regimes by solving the static and time-dependent Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations. We find a critical velocity v_{h} for traveling solitons that is much smaller than the value predicted using the Landau criterion due to spin-orbit coupling. Above v_{h}, our time-dependent simulations in harmonic traps indicate that traveling solitons decay by radiating sound waves. In the topological phase, we predict the existence of peculiar Majorana solitons, which host two Majorana fermions and feature a phase jump of π across the soliton, irrespective of the velocity of travel. These unusual properties of Majorana solitons may open an alternative way to manipulate Majorana fermions for fault-tolerant topological quantum computations.
We will discuss recent results on the theoretical and experimental investigations on solitons in a superfluid Fermi gas along the BCS-BEC crossover. On the theory side, by solving the Bogoliubov de Gennes equations and looking for real and odd solutions for the order parameter, it has been shown that a dark soliton at unitarity posses a large density contrast and fermionic bound states. The superfluid gap is found to be significantly quenched by the presence of the soliton due to the occurrence of Andreev fermionic bound states localized near the nodal plane of the order parameter. By solving the time dependent Bogoliubov de Gennes equations, also the decay and collisions of dark solitons has been investigated. Recently, a cascade of Solitonic Excitations in a Superfluid Fermi gas has been experimentally observed.
Families of dark solitons exist in superfluid Fermi gases. The energy-velocity dispersion and number of depleted particles completely determine the dynamics of dark solitons on a slowly varying background density. For the unitary Fermi gas, we determine these relations from general scaling arguments and conservation of local particle number. We find solitons to oscillate sinusoidally at the trap frequency reduced by a factor of 1/31/\sqrt{3}1/3​. Numerical integration of the time-dependent Bogoliubov--de Gennes equation determines spatial profiles and soliton-dispersion relations across the BEC-BCS crossover, and proves consistent with the scaling relations at unitarity.
In this work dark soliton collisions in a one-dimensional superfluid Fermi gas are studied across the BEC-BCS crossover by means of a recently developed finite-temperature effective field theory (2015 Eur. Phys. J. B 88 122). The evolution of two counter-propagating solitons is simulated numerically based on the theory’s nonlinear equation of motion for the pair field. The resulting collisions are observed to introduce a spatial shift into the trajectories of the solitons. The magnitude of this shift is calculated and studied in different conditions of temperature and spin-imbalance. When moving away from the BEC-regime, the collisions are found to become inelastic, emitting the lost energy in the form of small-amplitude density oscillations. This inelasticity is quantified and its behavior analyzed and compared to the results of other works. The dispersion relation of the density oscillations is calculated and is demonstrated to show a good agreement with the spectrum of collective excitations of the superfluid.
We present an investigation of generation, dynamics, and stability of dark solitons in anisotropic Fermi gases for a range of particle numbers and trap aspect ratios within the framework of the order-parameter equation. We calculate the periods of dark solitons oscillating in a trap and find good agreement with the results based on the Bogoliubov--de Gennes equations. By studying the stability of initially off-center dark solitons under various tight transverse confinements in the unitarity limit, we not only give the criterion of dynamical stability, but also find that the soliton and a hybrid of solitons and vortex rings can be characterized by different oscillation periods. The stability criterion is not fulfilled by the parameters of the recent experiment of Yefsah et al. [Nature (London) 499, 426 (2013)]. Therefore, instead of a very slow oscillation as observed experimentally, we find that the created dark soliton undergoes a transverse snake instability with a collapse into vortex rings, which propagate in solitonlike manner with a nearly 2 times larger period.
We present a theoretical study of solitonlike solutions and their dynamics of ultracold superfluid Fermi gases trapped in a time-dependent three-dimensional (3D) harmonic potential with gain or loss. The 3D analytical solitonlike solutions are obtained without introducing any additional integrability constraints used elsewhere. The propagation of both bright- and dark-soliton-like solutions is investigated. We show that the amplitudes of dark-soliton-like solutions exhibit periodic oscillation, whereas those of the bright-soliton-like ones do not show such behavior. Moreover, we highlight that the oscillation periods of dark-soliton-like solutions predicted by our approach are matched very well with those observed in a recent experiment carried out by Yefsah et al. [T. Yefsah, A. T. Sommer, M. J. H. Ku, L. W. Cheuk, W. Ji, W. S. Bakr, and M. W. Zwierlein, Nature (London) 499, 426 (2013)NATUAS0028-083610.1038/nature12338] in both Bose-Einstein condensation and unitarity regimes.