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Physical Review A

Superfluid Bose-Fermi mixture with spin-orbit coupling

Liang‐Liang Wang, Wenjun Shao, Qing Sun, Jian Li

Published Mar 24, 2023• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

We investigate a fermionic superfluid with Raman-induced spin-orbit coupling immersed in a Bose-Einstein condensate. By minimizing the total free energy, we find that, with moderate repulsive interspecies interaction, a phase separation occurs where the otherwise nontopological uniform phase is divided into two parts: a purely fermionic one and a Bose-Fermi mix characterized by nontrivial topology with the winding number $W=1$. We verify that Majorana zero modes emerge at the phase interfaces by numerical simulations of the coupled Bogoliubov--de Gennes and Gross--Pitaevskii equations in real space. The tunability of the phase interfaces enables a direct manipulation of the predicted Majorana zero modes.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.107.033326

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We investigate a fermionic superfluid with Raman-induced spin-orbit coupling immersed in a Bose-Einstein condensate. By minimizing the total free energy, we find that, with moderate repulsive interspecies interaction, a phase separation occurs where the otherwise nontopological uniform phase is divided into two parts: a purely fermionic one and a Bose-Fermi mix characterized by nontrivial topology with the winding number W=1W=1W=1. We verify that Majorana zero modes emerge at the phase interfaces by numerical simulations of the coupled Bogoliubov--de Gennes and Gross--Pitaevskii equations in real space. The tunability of the phase interfaces enables a direct manipulation of the predicted Majorana zero modes.
We investigate the ground-state properties of a mixture of spin-1/2 Bose-Einstein condensate and spin-1/2 Fermi superfluid. In our system, bosons are subjected to a pair of Raman laser beams that induces spin-orbit coupling, while fermions are not coupled to the Raman laser. We show that the fermions can acquire an effective spin-orbit coupling from the spin-exchange interaction between bosons and fermions. In the regime where the boson number is more than the fermion number, we study the topological phase transition of the Fermi superfluid by monitoring the close and re-open of the energy gap, the Berry phase, and the superfluid order parameter, where the back-action to the Bose condensate is also taken into consideration. Our work provides a new way of achieve topological Fermi superfluid … The American Physical Society (APS) is a non-profit membership organization working to advance the knowledge of physics.
The two-dimensional spin-imbalanced Fermi gas subject to sss-wave pairing and spin-orbit coupling is considered a promising platform for realizing a topological chiral-ppp-wave superfluid. In the BCS limit of sss-wave pairing, i.e., when Cooper pairs are only weakly bound, the system enters the topological phase via a second-order transition driven by increasing the Zeeman spin-splitting energy. Stronger attractive two-particle interactions cause the system to undergo the BCS-BEC crossover, in the course of which the topological transition becomes first order. As a result, topological and nontopological superfluids coexist in spatially separated domains in an extended region of phase space spanned by the strength of sss-wave interactions and the Zeeman energy. Here we investigate this phase-coexistence region theoretically using a zero-temperature mean-field approach. Exact numerical results are presented to illustrate basic physical characteristics of the coexisting phases and to validate an approximate analytical description derived for weak spin-orbit coupling. Besides extending our current understanding of spin-imbalanced superfluid Fermi systems, the present approach also provides a platform for future studies of unconventional Majorana excitations that, according to topology, should be present at the internal interface between coexisting topological and nontopological superfluid parts of the system.
We consider a system of repulsively interacting Bose-Fermi mixtures of spin-polarized uniform atomic gases at zero temperature. We examine possible realization of ppp-wave superfluidity of fermions due to an effective attractive interaction via density fluctuations of Bose-Einstein condensate within mean-field approximation. We find the ground state of the system by direct energy comparison of the ppp-wave superfluid state in a single uniform mixed phase and normal Fermi gas state in a phase-separated phase, and suggest an occurrence of the ppp-wave superfluidity for a strong boson-fermion interaction regime. We study some signatures of the ppp-wave superfluid, such as anisotropic energy gap and quasiparticle energy in the axial state, that have not been observed in spin-unpolarized superfluid of atomic fermions. We also show that a Cooper pair is a tightly bound state, such as a diatomic molecule in the strong boson-fermion coupling regime, and suggest an observable indication of the ppp-wave superfluid in the real experiment.
We discuss topological phase transitions in ultracold Fermi superfluids induced by interactions and artificial spin-orbit fields. We construct the phase diagram for population-imbalanced systems at zero and finite temperatures, and analyze spectroscopic and thermodynamic properties to characterize various phase transitions. For balanced systems, the evolution from Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer to Bose-Einstein-condensate superfluids in the presence of spin-orbit effects is only a crossover as the system remains fully gapped, even though a triplet component of the order parameter emerges in the helicity basis. However, for imbalanced populations, spin-orbit fields induce a triplet component for the order parameter in the helicity basis, and may produce nodes in the quasiparticle excitation spectrum leading to bulk topological phase transitions of the Lifshitz type. Additionally a fully gapped phase exists, where a crossover from indirect to direct gap occurs, but a topological transition to a gapped phase possessing Majorana fermion edge states does not occur.
We theoretically predict an exotic topological superfluid state with a spatially modulated pairing gap in one-dimensional spin-orbit-coupled Fermi gases. This inhomogeneous topological superfluidity is induced by applying simultaneously a perpendicular Zeeman magnetic field and an equally weighted Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling in one-dimensional optical lattices. Based on the self-consistent Bogoliubov-de Gennes theory, we confirm that this novel topological phase is a unique condensation of Cooper pairs, which manifests the interplay between the inhomogeneity of a superfluid and its nontrivial topological structure. The properties of the emergent Majorana bound states are investigated in detail by examining the associated Z2 topological number, the eigenenergy and density of states spectra, as well as the wave functions of the localized Majorana end modes. The experimental feasibility of observing this new topological state of matter is also discussed.
We consider a mixture of spin-1/2 bosons and fermions, where only the bosons are subjected to the spin-orbit coupling induced by Raman beams. The fermions, although not directly coupled to the Raman lasers, acquire an effective spin-orbit coupling through the spin-exchange interaction between the two species. Our calculation shows that this is a promising way of obtaining spin-orbit coupled Fermi gas without Raman-induced heating, where the long-sought topological Fermi superfluids and topological bands can be realized. Conversely, we find that the presence of fermions not only provides a new way to create the supersolid stripe phase of the bosons, but more strikingly it can also greatly increase the spatial period of the bosonic density stripes, and hence makes this phase directly observable in the experiment. This system provides a new and practical platform to explore the physics of spin-orbit coupling, which possesses a dynamic nature through the interaction between the two species.