In this paper we address the behavior of the superfluid transition temperature
Tc in the attractive Hubbard model. The attractive Hubbard model can be regarded as the generalization of the BCS to Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) crossover to a lattice and, as such, may have implications for future optical lattice studies. Nevertheless, the BEC limit of the Hubbard model is very different from that of the better-studied Fermi gases, owing to the strong intersite repulsion between pairs. Here we address systematically the effects of pairing fluctuations for all filling fractions over the entire range of attractive interaction strength. A central conclusion of our work is that in a lattice, around half filling, the smooth evolution from the BCS to the BEC limits is interrupted:
Tc vanishes when the system approaches the bosonic regime with increasing interaction strength. We suggest that this interruption of crossover may signal a quantum critical transition to another form of superfluid not continuously connected to a BCS-like phase. A simple variational ansatz for an alternate ground state in this more strongly coupled superfluid is presented. A generalization of the (
s-wave) Hubbard model to
d-wave pairing allows us to address issues of relevance to high-
Tc superconductivity. The phase diagram (representing the pairing or pseudogap onset temperature
T∗ and
Tc) shows that here too one observes a vanishing of
Tc when
T∗ becomes sufficiently large. Given this predicted breakdown of the crossover, and given the striking similarity to features of the cuprate phase diagram, we suggest that future experiments on ultracold fermions in optical lattices should not be exclusively limited to the repulsive Hubbard model, but should address the attractive model in order to elucidate features of high-temperature superconductivity.
We consider a system of repulsively interacting Bose-Fermi mixtures of spin-polarized uniform atomic gases at zero temperature. We examine possible realization of
p-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
p-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
p-wave superfluidity for a strong boson-fermion interaction regime. We study some signatures of the
p-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
p-wave superfluid in the real experiment.
We study the superfluid behavior of ultracold atomic Fermi gases with a short range attractive interaction in a two-dimensional optical lattice (2DOL) using a pairing fluctuation theory, within the context of BCS-BEC crossover. We find that the mixing of lattice and continuum dimensions leads to exotic phenomena. For relatively large lattice constant
d and small hopping integral
t, the superfluid transition temperature
Tc exhibits a remarkable reentrant behavior as a function of the interaction strength, and leads to a pair density wave ground state, where
Tc vanishes, for a range of intermediate coupling strength. In the unitary and BCS regimes, hole-like pairing emerges, with an unexpected nonmonotonic dependence of the chemical potential on the pairing strength. The BEC asymptotic behaviors exhibit distinct power law dependencies on the interaction strength compared to cases of pure 3D lattice, 3D continuum, and 1DOL.
We investigate many-body phase diagrams of atomic boson-fermion mixtures loaded in the two-dimensional optical lattice. Bosons mediate an attractive, finite-range interaction between fermions, leading to fermion pairing phases of different orbital symmetries. Specifically, we show that by properly tuning atomic and lattice parameters it is possible to create superfluids with
s-,
p-, and
d-wave pairing symmetry as well as spin and charge density wave phases. These phases and their stability are analyzed within the mean-field approximation for systems of $^{40}\mathrm{K}\text{\ensuremath{-}}^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$ and $^{40}\mathrm{K}\text{\ensuremath{-}}^{23}\mathrm{Na}$ mixtures. For the experimentally accessible regime of parameters, superfluids with unconventional fermion pairing have transition temperature around a percent of the Fermi energy.
We investigate an ultracold Bose-Fermi mixture with a Feshbach resonance between two hyperfine states of fermions. Using a functional integral method, we calculate collective modes associated with fermion pairs and bosons in the superfluid phase. We derive a stability condition of the mixtures that is valid in the entire region of the BCS-BEC crossover. This stability condition, which smoothly connects the well-known results obtained in both the BCS and Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) limits, shows that sufficiently strong fermion-boson (FB) interactions destabilize the mixtures. In order to investigate the consequence of this instability, we study the ground-state energy of both the uniformly mixed and the phase-separated states. We find that FB repulsion induces a phase separation, whereas FB attraction should cause a collapse of the mixture. The possibilities for the experimental observation of such instabilities are also discussed.
We studied the localization property of Bose-Fermi mixture systems on incommensurate optical lattices by using quantum Monte-Carlo simulations. We found a characteristic behavior of the superfluid density when changing the Bose-Bose interactions and Bose-Fermi interactions over a wide range. The superfluidity of the bosons was enhanced in the presence of the fermions by the repulsive Bose-Fermi interactions which counteracted the localization of the bosons. With attractive Bose-Fermi interactions, on the other hand, the superfluidity is also enhanced by a different mechanism when the number of the bosons is much larger than that of the fermions.