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arXiv:1802.02703 · Physical Review A

Strongly interacting Sarma superfluid near orbital Feshbach resonances

Peng Zou, Lianyi He, Xia-Ji Liu, Hui Hu

Published Apr 17, 2018• 17 citations
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Abstract

We investigate the nature of superfluid pairing in a strongly interacting Fermi gas near orbital Feshbach resonances with spin-population imbalance in three dimensions, which can be well described by a two-band or two-channel model. We show that a Sarma superfluid with gapless single-particle excitations is favored in the closed channel at large imbalance. It is thermodynamically stable against the formation of an inhomogeneous Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov superfluid and features a well-defined Goldstone-Anderson-Bogoliubov phonon mode and a massive Leggett mode as collective excitations at low momentum. At large momentum, the Leggett mode disappears and the phonon mode becomes damped at zero temperature, due to the coupling to the particle-hole excitations. We discuss possible experimental observation of a strongly interacting Sarma superfluid with ultracold alkaline-earth-metal Fermi gases.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.97.043616

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We investigate the nature of superfluid pairing in a strongly interacting Fermi gas near orbital Feshbach resonances with spin-population imbalance in three dimensions, which can be well described by a two-band or two-channel model. We show that a Sarma superfluid with gapless single-particle excitations is favored in the closed channel at large imbalance. It is thermodynamically stable against the formation of an inhomogeneous Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov superfluid and features a well-defined Goldstone-Anderson-Bogoliubov phonon mode and a massive Leggett mode as collective excitations at low momentum. At large momentum, the Leggett mode disappears and the phonon mode becomes damped at zero temperature, due to the coupling to the particle-hole excitations. We discuss possible experimental observation of a strongly interacting Sarma superfluid with ultracold alkaline-earth-metal Fermi gases.
We investigate the Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) and Sarma superfluid states in alkaline-earth-like 173Yb^{173}\mathrm{Yb}173Yb atomic gases near an orbital Feshbach resonance at zero temperature with population imbalances in both the open and closed channels. We find that, in uniform space, both the Fulde-Ferrell and Sarma states are greatly enhanced by the spin-exchange interaction on the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer side of the Feshbach resonance. While trapped in a harmonic potential, a cloud of long-lived 173Yb^{173}\mathrm{Yb}173Yb atomic gas with small fraction of electronically excited-state population can stabilize not only the Sarma states with both the one and two Fermi surfaces but also the Fulde-Ferrell state, and leave detectable structures in the distribution of polarizations of different bands. As the degenerate 173Yb^{173}\mathrm{Yb}173Yb cloud is readily available and the signatures predicted can be easily detected in in situ and/or time-of-flight images, our findings are helpful to realize and detect the long-sought FFLO and Sarma states in experiments.
We discuss the collective modes in an alkaline-earth-metal Fermi gas close to an orbital Feshbach resonance. Unlike the usual Feshbach resonance, the orbital Feshbach resonance in alkaline-earth-metal atoms realizes a two-band superfluid system where the fermionic nature of both the open and the closed channel has to be taken into account. We show that, apart from the usual Anderson-Bogoliubov mode which corresponds to the oscillation of total density, there also appears the long-sought Leggett mode corresponding to the oscillation of relative density between the two channels. The existence of the phonon and the Leggett modes and their evolution are discussed in detail. We show how these collective modes are reflected in the density response of the system.
We theoretically investigate dynamic structure factors of a strongly interacting Fermi superfluid near an orbital Feshbach resonance with random phase approximation approach at zero temperature, and find their dynamical characters across the phase transition from a balanced conventional Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superfluid to a polarized Sarma superfluid by continuously varying the chemical potential difference of two spin components. In a Bose-Einstein-condensate-like regime of the Fermi superfluid, dynamic structure factors can help distinguish the in-phase ground state from the out-of-phase metastable state by the relative location of molecular excitation and Leggett mode, or the minimum energy to break a Cooper pair. In the phase transition from BCS to Sarma superfluid, we find the dynamic structure factor of Sarma superfluid has its own specific gapless excitation at a small transferred momentum where the collective phonon excitation acquires a finite width, and also a relatively strong atomic excitation at a large transferred momentum, because of the existence of unpaired Fermi atoms. Our results can be used to differentiate Sarma superfluid from BCS superfluid.
An asymmetric three-component Fermi gas, featuring Raman-induced spin-orbit coupling between the first and second components and contact interaction only between the first and third components, introduces both spin-orbit coupling and population imbalance-two mechanisms known to stabilize the Fulde-Ferrell superfluids.We systematically study Fulde-Ferrell superfluids in an asymmetric three-component Fermi gas { in two dimensions and at zero temperature} by finding the global minima of the thermodynamic potential. We reveal a new class of composite Fulde-Ferrell superfluids that emerges when strong spin-orbit coupling generates a double-well structure in momentum space within the lower spin-orbit-coupled band. The key features of these composite superfluids are identified.
We theoretically investigate the superfluid properties of a two-band gas of 173Yb^{173}\mathrm{Yb}173Yb Fermi atoms with an orbital Feshbach resonance (OFR). To describe the BCS-BEC crossover region, we include superfluid fluctuations caused by interband and intraband pairing interactions associated with OFR by extending the strong-coupling theory developed by Nozi\`eres and Schmitt-Rink to the two-band case below the superfluid phase transition temperature; however, the effects of an experimentally inaccessible deep bound state are removed to model a real 173Yb^{173}\mathrm{Yb}173Yb Fermi gas near OFR. We show that the condensate fraction in the upper closed channel gradually becomes smaller than that in the lower open channel as one moves from the strong- to the weak-coupling regime, because the OFR-pairing mechanism tunes the interaction strengths by adjusting the energy difference between the two bands. However, even when the closed-channel band is much higher in energy than the open-channel band in the weak-coupling regime, the magnitude of the superfluid order parameter in the closed channel is found to be still comparable to that in the open channel. As the reason for this, we point out a pair-tunneling effect by the OFR-induced interband interaction. In addition to these superfluid quantities, we also examine collective modes, such as the Goldstone mode, the Schmid (Higgs) mode, and Leggett mode, to clarify how they appear in the spectral weights of pair-correlation functions in each band. Since the realization of a multiband superfluid Fermi gas is a crucial issue in cold Fermi gas physics, our results would contribute to the basic understanding of this type of Fermi superfluid in the BCS-BEC crossover region.
We theoretically investigate the inhomogeneous Fulde–Ferrell (FF) superfluidity in a three-dimensional atomic Fermi gas with Rashba spin–orbit coupling near a broad Feshbach resonance. We show that within mean-field theory the FF superfluid state is always more favorable than the standard Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer superfluid state when an in-plane Zeeman field is applied. We present a qualitative finite-temperature phase diagram near resonance and argue that the predicted FF superfluid is observable with experimentally attainable temperatures (i.e. T ∼ 0.2 T F , where T F is the characteristic Fermi degenerate temperature).