Superfluid properties across the BEC/BCS transition

Sarang Gopalakrishnan

A superfluid-insulator transition is known to occur in strongly disordered Fermi gases, in both the BCS and BEC regimes; here, we address the properties of this transition across the BEC-BCS crossover. We argue that the critical disorder strength at which superfluidity is lost changes non-monotonically with detuning from Feshbach resonance, and that a reentrant superfluid phase arises for detunings near the fermionic mobility edge. Our analysis of the intermediate regime is quantitatively valid for narrow resonances and near four dimensions, and provides a simple physical picture of this regime, in terms of two distinct but coexisting insulators.

Han Li, Carlos A. R. Sá de Melo

Masahiko Machida, Tomio Koyama, Yoji Ohashi

Andrew Vincent, Theja N. De Silva

We study static superfluid properties of alkali-earth-like Fermi atomic systems in the presence of orbital Feshbach resonance. Using a two-band description of the ground state and excited state and a mean-field approximation of the intraband atomic pairing, we investigate the phase transitions and crossover between BCS and Bose-Einstein-condensate (BEC) superfluidity. At zero temperature, we find exact BCS analytical solutions for the mean-field gap equations and number equations. Using these exact solutions, we calculate various static properties, such as superfluid order parameters, chemical potentials, density variations, density profiles, correlation and coherence lengths, ground-state energy, and Tan's contact density across the entire BCS-BEC crossover region. We anticipate that our closed-form analytical results can be used as a benchmark for future experimental and theoretical investigations and will have an impact on the current understanding of two-band superconductors such as ${\mathrm{MgB}}_{2}$.

Ran Qi, Hui Zhai

We address the phase of a highly polarized Fermi gases across a narrow Feshbach resonance starting from the problem of a single down-spin fermion immersed in a Fermi sea of up spins. Both polaron and pairing states are considered using the variational wave function approach, and we find that the polaron-to-pairing transition will take place on the BCS side of the resonance, strongly in contrast to a wide resonance where the transition is located at the BEC side. For the pairing phase, we find the critical strength of the repulsive interaction between pairs above which the mixture of pairs and fermions will not phase separate. Therefore, nearby a narrow resonance, it is quite likely that magnetism can coexist with $s$-wave BCS superfluidity at large Zeeman fields, which is a remarkable property absent in conventional BCS superconductors (or fermion-pair superfluids).

Yoji Ohashi