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Boundary-Obstructed Topological Superfluids in Staggered Spin-Orbit Coupled Fermi Gases

Yu‐Biao Wu, Guang‐Can Guo, Zhen Zheng, Xu‐Bo Zou

Published Jul 31, 2020• 2 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

We present an experimental feasible proposal for synthesizing second-order topological superfluids that support Majorana corner modes in spin-orbit coupled Fermi gases. For this purpose, we consider the staggered spin-orbit coupling introduced in one direction. This results in a system consisted of two sublattices, providing extra degree of freedom for the emergent higher-order topological state. We find the topological trivial superfluids, first-order topological superfluids and boundary-obstructed second-order topological superfluids, as well as different topological phase transitions among them with respect to the the experimental tunable parameters. At the weak interaction regime, the phase transition is characterized by the Chern number accompanied by the bulk gap closing and reopening. However, at the strong interaction regime, we find the system can support the boundary-obstructed topological superfluids with Majorana corner modes, but topological phase transition dose not undergo the gap-closing of bulk bands. Instead the transition is refined by the quadrupole moment and signaled out by the gap-closing of edge-state. The proposal is simply based on the $s$-wave interaction and readily feasible via existing experimental techniques, which suggests new possibilities in interacting spin-orbit coupled systems by unifying both first- and higher-order topological superfluids in a simple but realistic microscopic model.

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We present an experimental feasible proposal for synthesizing second-order topological superfluids that support Majorana corner modes in spin-orbit coupled Fermi gases. For this purpose, we consider the staggered spin-orbit coupling introduced in one direction. This results in a system consisted of two sublattices, providing extra degree of freedom for the emergent higher-order topological state. We find the topological trivial superfluids, first-order topological superfluids and boundary-obstructed second-order topological superfluids, as well as different topological phase transitions among them with respect to the the experimental tunable parameters. At the weak interaction regime, the phase transition is characterized by the Chern number accompanied by the bulk gap closing and reopening. However, at the strong interaction regime, we find the system can support the boundary-obstructed topological superfluids with Majorana corner modes, but topological phase transition dose not undergo the gap-closing of bulk bands. Instead the transition is refined by the quadrupole moment and signaled out by the gap-closing of edge-state. The proposal is simply based on the sss-wave interaction and readily feasible via existing experimental techniques, which suggests new possibilities in interacting spin-orbit coupled systems by unifying both first- and higher-order topological superfluids in a simple but realistic microscopic model.
Higher-order topological superfluids have gapped bulk and symmetry-protected Majorana zero modes with various localizations. Motivated by recent advances, we present a proposal for synthesizing multiorder topological superfluids that support various Majorana zero modes in ultracold atomic gases. For this purpose, we use the two-dimensional optical superlattice that introduces a spatial modulation to the spin-orbit coupling in one direction, providing an extra degree of freedom for the emergent higher-order topological state. We find the topologically trivial superfluids, first-order and second-order topological superfluids, as well as different topological phase transitions among them with respect to the experimentally tunable parameters. Besides the conventional transition characterized by the Chern number associated with the bulk gap closing and reopening, we find the system can support the topological superfluids with Majorana corner modes, but the topological phase transition undergoes no gap-closing of bulk bands. Instead, the transition is refined by the quadrupole moment and signaled out by the gap-closing of edge states. The proposal is based on the sss-wave interaction and is valid using existing experimental techniques, which unifies multiorder topological phase transitions in a simple but realistic system.
The experimental realizations of spin-orbit coupling (SOC) in cold atom gases put topological superfluids (TSs) under the spotlight. The topological protection of suggested superfluid models comes from the local antiunitary symmetries of ten Altland-Zirnbauer symmetry classes. In this paper we theoretically study a two-dimensional BDI model describing spin-orbit-coupled bilayer fermionic gases with sss-wave interaction to realize mirror-symmetry- (nonlocal and unitary) protected gapped TS, beyond the paradigms suggested before. This gapped phase not only shows linearly dispersive Majorana zero modes on mirror invariant one-dimensional boundaries, but also shows Majorana corner states to realize the second-order TS (TS2) with sss-wave pairing, which is explicitly different from the nonconventional pairings in the suggested systems to realize TS2. Generally, engineering the single-particle band structures should be easier than directly engineering the complicated pairings. Considering the tremendous progress in manipulating cold atom systems, our work provides a possible route (by engineering the single-particle physics, such as SOC) to realize mirror-symmetry-protected gapped TS and TS2 in cold fermionic systems in the future.
We propose a simple experimental scheme to realize simultaneously the one-dimensional spin-orbit coupling and the staggered spin flip in ultracold pseudospin-1/21/21/2 atomic Fermi gases trapped in optical lattices. In the absence of interspecies interactions, the system supports type-I and II Weyl semimetals in three-dimensional and gapped Chern insulators and gapless topological semimetal states in two-dimensional lattices. By turning on the sss-wave interactions, a rich variety of gapped and gapless inhomogeneous topological superfluids can emerge. In particular, a gapped topological Fulde-Ferrell superfluid, which supports the chiral edge states at opposite boundaries with the same chirality, is predicted.
The twodimensional chiral p-wave superfluid is known to be topological, with gapless Majorana states expected to exist at its edge. The possibility to utilise such Majorana excitations as fault-tolerant quantum bits has spurred interest in robust experimental realisation of such systems. One proposed pathway is to use spin-orbit coupled and spin-imbalanced ultracold gases of fermionic atoms subject to conventional s-wave pairing, as inducing a large-enough Zeeman energy splitting between pseudo-spin-1/2 states drives the system into a topological superfluid (TSF) phase with chiral-p-wave characteristics. In this thesis, we apply and extend advanced theoretical methods to study this topological phase transition in detail. Specifically, our work elucidates what happens when the s-wave interaction strength between atoms is increased so that the system undergoes the BCS-to-BEC crossover. While previous studies have largely focused on the weakly interacting BCS regime, studying the full crossover reveals new properties of the TSF phase that may aid its experimental realisation in the future. In particular, we obtain phase diagrams in the parameter space of the s-wave interaction strength and Zeeman energy. As long as the system is in the nontopological superfluid (NSF) phase, it shows the ordinary features expected during the BCS-to-BEC crossover, such as the shrinking and disappearance of the Fermi surfaces as the s-wave interaction strength is increased. The TSF phase, however, exhibits strikingly different behavior: it retains the BCS-limit characteristics of a TSF even as the s-wave interaction strength reaches extremely large values. The phase diagrams we obtain also show that increasing the s-wave interaction strength changes the nature of the topological transition from second-order continuous to first-order. During the first-order topological transition, the system splits into coexisting regions of NSF and TSF phases. We study this phase coexistence theoretically and obtain analytical formulae that capture the behaviour of all relevant thermodynamic quantities during the first-order topological transition. In that, our work extends current fundamental knowledge about spin-imbalanced Fermi gases to situations with finite spin-orbit coupling. We also investigate the gapless edge states emerging at the system’s boundaries, as these are crucial for experiments that aim to observe topological phases and realise novel quantum-information-processing architectures. The principle of bulk-boundary correspondence guarantees that gapless Majorana excitations should be localised to the interface between coexisting NSF and TSF regions. We develop a detailed theoretical description of this novel topological interface state and compare its physical features with those exhibited by the Majorana states expected to exist at the system’s boundary with vacuum.
A topological superfluid phase characterized by an emergent chiral-p-wave pair potential is expected to form in a two-dimensional Fermi superfluid subject to s-wave pairing, spin-orbit coupling and a large-enough Zeeman splitting. Andreev bound states appear at phase boundaries, including Majorana zero modes whose existence is assured by the bulk-boundary correspondence principle. Here we study the physical properties of these subgap-energy bound states at step-like interfaces using the spin-resolved Bogoliubov-de Gennes mean-field formalism and assuming small spin-orbit coupling. Extending a recently developed spin-projection technique based on Feshbach partitioning [SciPost Phys. 5, 016 (2018)] combined with the Andreev approximation allows us to obtain remarkably simple analytical expressions for the bound-state energies as well as the majority and minority spin components of their wave functions. Besides the vacuum boundary, where a majority-spin Majorana excitation is encountered, we also consider the boundary between the topological and a nontopological superfluid phase that can appear in a coexistence scenario due to the first-order topological phase transition predicted for this system. At this superfluid-superfluid interface, we find a localized chiral Majorana mode hosted by the minority-spin sector. Our theory further predicts majority-spin subgap-energy bound states similar to those found at a Josephson junction between same-chirality p-wave superfluids. Their presence affects the Majorana mode due to a coupling of minority and majority spin sectors only in the small energy range where their spectra overlap. Our results may inform experimental efforts aimed at realizing and characterizing unconventional Majorana quasiparticles.
Topological superfluids usually refer to a superfluid state which is gapped in the bulk but metallic at the boundary. Here we report that a gapless, topologically nontrivial superfluid with an inhomogeneous Fulde-Ferrell pairing order parameter can emerge in a two-dimensional spin-orbit coupled Fermi gas, in the presence of both in-plane and out-of-plane Zeeman fields. The Fulde-Ferrell pairing-induced by the spin-orbit coupling and in-plane Zeeman field-is responsible for this gapless feature. This exotic superfluid has a significant Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition temperature and has robust Majorana edge modes against disorder owing to its topological nature.