Collective and Individual Excitations of Spatially Inhomogeneous Superfluid Phases in Ultracold Quantum Gases

健 水島

Peng Zou, Lianyi He, Xia-Ji Liu +1 more

We investigate the nature of superfluid pairing in a strongly interacting Fermi gas near orbital Feshbach resonances with spin-population imbalance in three dimensions, which can be well described by a two-band or two-channel model. We show that a Sarma superfluid with gapless single-particle excitations is favored in the closed channel at large imbalance. It is thermodynamically stable against the formation of an inhomogeneous Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov superfluid and features a well-defined Goldstone-Anderson-Bogoliubov phonon mode and a massive Leggett mode as collective excitations at low momentum. At large momentum, the Leggett mode disappears and the phonon mode becomes damped at zero temperature, due to the coupling to the particle-hole excitations. We discuss possible experimental observation of a strongly interacting Sarma superfluid with ultracold alkaline-earth-metal Fermi gases.

Gretchen K. Campbell

恵美子 荒畑

Philipp M. Preiss

Interacting Fermi systems in two dimensions display intriguing phenomena such as high temperature superfluidity and pseudogap physics. These features emerge from the collective behavior of the constituent particles but are extremely hard to predict from microscopic theory. I will report on experiments that realize microscopic two-dimensional systems with ultracold fermionic lithium atoms. With the ability to deterministically prepare few-body ground states and to observe individual particles in momentum space, they enable a microscopic view of strongly interacting two-dimensional Fermi systems. Surprisingly, we find that characteristic features of many-body Fermi gases can already be found in systems of no more than a dozen particles: In spectroscopy, we observe collective excitations that are the few-body precursor of the Higgs amplitude mode of a superfluid. Moreover, in spin-resolved momentum space probes, we can directly image individual ‘Cooper pairs’ and show the presence of fermionic pairing even in a microscopic setting. These findings may broaden our understanding of finite-size Fermi systems, such as atomic nuclei and superconducting grains.

Moroni Santiago-García, Arturo Camacho-Guardian

Abstract The exchange of collective modes has been demonstrated to be a powerful tool for inducing superconductivity and superfluidity in various condensed matter and atomic systems. In this article, we study the mediated interactions of collective excitations in an ultracold gas of hard-core bosons. We show that the induced interaction supports two-body states with energies, symmetries, and a number of bound states strongly dependent on the properties of the hard-core boson gas. The ability to control the nature of the two-body bound states motivates the study of superfluid phases, which we address within the BKT theory. We demonstrate how the superfluid parameters and critical temperatures can be tuned in our system. Our findings may pave the way for future theoretical and experimental studies with ultracold gases and solid-state systems.