Anomalous Weyl superfluid in three-dimensional ultracold fermionic gases

Beibing Huang

Q. J. Chen, C.-C. Chien, Y. He +1 more

Martin W. Zwierlein

Beibing Huang, Xiaosen Yang

Abstract The gapless Weyl superfluid has been widely studied in the three-dimensional ultracold fermionic superfluid. In contrast to Weyl superfluid, there exists another kind of gapless superfluid with topologically protected nodal lines, which can be regarded as the superfluid counterpart of nodal line semimetal in the condensed matter physics, just as Weyl superfluid with Weyl semimetal. In this paper we study the ground states of the cold fermionic gases in cubic optical lattices with one-dimensional spin-orbit coupling and transverse Zeeman field and map out the topological phase diagram of the system. We demonstrate that in addition to a fully gapped topologically trivial phase, some different nodal line superfluid phases appear when the Zeeman field is adjusted. The presence of topologically stable nodal lines implies the dispersionless zero-energy flat band in a finite region of the surface Brillouin zone. Experimentally these nodal line superfluid states can be detected via the momentum-resolved radio-frequency spectroscopy. The nodal line topological superfluid provide fertile grounds for exploring exotic quantum matters in the context of ultracold atoms.

Wolfgang Ketterle, Yong-il Shin, André Schirotzek +1 more

Kangjun Seo, Chuanwei Zhang, Sumanta Tewari

We discuss the thermodynamic signatures for the topological phase transitions into Majorana and Weyl superfluid phases in ultracold Fermi gases in two and three dimensions (2D and 3D) in the presence of Rashba spin-orbit coupling and a Zeeman field. We analyze the thermodynamic properties exhibiting the distinct nature of the topological phase transitions linked with the Majorana fermions (2D Fermi gas) and Weyl fermions (3D Fermi gas) which can be observed experimentally, including pressure, chemical potential, isothermal compressibility, entropy, and specific heat, as a function of the interaction and the Zeeman field at both zero and finite temperatures. We conclude that among the various thermodynamic quantities, the isothermal compressibility and the chemical potential as functions of the artificial Zeeman field have the strongest signatures of the topological transitions in both two and three dimensions.