Instabilities of Spin-polarized Fermions in Optical Lattice

R. Ganesh, A. A. Burkov, Arun Paramekanti

R. Ganesh, Arun Paramekanti, A. A. Burkov

Brian DeMarco

Miguel A. Cazalilla, A. F. Ho

We show that one-dimensional binary mixtures of bosons or of a boson and a spin-polarized fermion are Luttinger liquids with the following instabilities: (i) For different particle densities, strong attraction between the mixture components leads to collapse, while strong repulsion leads to demixing, and (ii) For a low-density mixture of two gases of impenetrable bosons (or a spin-polarized fermion and an impenetrable boson) of equal densities, the system develops a gap and exhibits enhanced pairing fluctuations when there is attraction between the components. In the boson-fermion mixture, the pairing fluctuations occur at finite momentum. Our conclusions apply to mixtures both on the continuum and on optical lattices away from integer or fractional commensurability.

A. A. Burkov, Arun Paramekanti

We investigate the stability of superflow of paired fermions in an optical lattice. We show that there are two distinct dynamical instabilities which limit the superflow in this system. One dynamical instability occurs when the superfluid stiffness becomes negative; this evolves, with increasing pairing interaction, from the fermion pair breaking instability to the well-known dynamical instability of lattice bosons. The second, more interesting, dynamical instability is marked by the emergence of a transient atom density wave. Both dynamical instabilities can be experimentally accessed by tuning the pairing interaction and the fermion density.

J. Krauser, Jannes Heinze, Nick Fl aschner +3 more