Motivated by the prospect of Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) pairing in cold fermionic gases we analyze the superfluid phase of three fermionic flavors in the attractive Hubbard model. We show that there are several low-lying collective pairing modes and investigate their damping due to the partially gapless nature of the single-particle spectrum. Furthermore, we analyze how these modes show up in the density response of the system. Apart from the Anderson-Bogoliubov phase mode of the pairing between two flavors, the dynamical structure factor contains signatures of the gapless third flavor. This picture is found to be robust against perturbations that break the global SU(3) symmetry of the Hamiltonian.
Motivated by the prospect of Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) pairing in cold fermionic gases we analyze the superfluid phase of three fermionic flavors in the attractive Hubbard model. We show that there are several low-lying collective pairing modes and investigate their damping due to the partially gapless nature of the single-particle spectrum. Furthermore, we analyze how these modes show up in the density response of the system. Apart from the Anderson-Bogoliubov phase mode of the pairing between two flavors, the dynamical structure factor contains signatures of the gapless third flavor. This picture is found to be robust against perturbations that break the global SU(3) symmetry of the Hamiltonian.
The low-energy modes of a superfluid atomic Fermi gas at zero temperature are investigated. The Bose-Einstein-condensate (BEC) side of the superfluid phase is studied in detail. The atoms are assumed to be in only one internal state, so that for a sufficiently diluted gas the pairing of fermions can be considered effective in the l=1 channel only. In agreement with previous works on p-wave superfluidity in Fermi systems, it is found that the px+ipy phase represents the lowest energy state in both the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) and BEC sides. Our calculations show that at low energy three branches of collective modes can emerge, with different species of dispersion relations: a phonon-like mode, a single-particle-like mode and a gapped mode. A comparison with the Bogoliubov excitations of the corresponding spinor Bose condensate is made. They reproduce the dispersion relations of the excitation modes of the p-wave superfluid Fermi gas to a high accuracy.
We investigate the homogeneous superfluid mixtures of a Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superfluid originating from pairing two-species fermionic atoms and superfluidity stemming from condensation of bosonic atoms. By integrating out the freedoms associated with the BCS superfluid, we derive the fermion-mediated interactions between bosons, which is attractive and can be tuned from long range in the BCS region to short range in the region of Bose-Einstein condensation of molecular dimers. By analyzing the Bogoliubov spectrum and the damping rate of bosonic superfluid, we map out the phase diagram spanned by the boson-fermion mass ratio and the boson-fermion coupling strength, which consists of a phase separation region and two phase-mixing regions with and without Landau damping. The three different phases can coexist at a tricritical point, which moves toward a low boson-fermion mass ratio and a high boson-fermion scattering length as the fermion-fermion interaction strength is tuned up on the BCS side.
Superconductivity and superfluidity of fermions require, within the BCS theory, matching of the Fermi energies of the two interacting Fermion species. Difference in the number densities of the two species leads either to a normal state, to phase separation, or---potentially---to exotic forms of superfluidity such as Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) state, Sarma state, or breached pair state. We consider ultracold Fermi gases with polarization, i.e., spin-density imbalance. We show that, due to the gases being trapped and isolated from the environment in terms of particle exchange, exotic forms of superfluidity appear as a shell around the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superfluid core of the gas and, for large density imbalance, in the core as well. We obtain these results by describing the effect of the trapping potential by using the Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations. For comparison to experiments, we calculate also the condensate fraction, and show that, in the center of the trap, a polarized superfluid leads to a small dip in the central density difference. We compare the results to those given by local density approximation and find qualitatively different behavior.
We theoretically investigate a one-dimensional Fulde-Ferrell Fermi superfluid at a finite effective Zeeman field h, and study entire dynamical excitations related to density perturbation. By calculating the density dynamic structure factor, we find anisotropic dynamical excitations in both collective modes and single-particle excitations. Along the direction of centre-of-mass momentum p, there are two obvious gapless collective modes with different speed. The lower collective modes is from the usual gauge symmetry breaking and has a larger speed than the one in the negative direction of p. The higher one is due to the direction spontaneous symmetry breaking of centre-of-mass momentum p, and separates two kinds of single-particle excitations in the positive p direction. However, this higher mode disappears in the opposite direction of p, where two single-particle excitations overlap with each other. These signals of dynamical excitations can do help to distinguish Fulde-Ferrell superfluid from the conventional Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer superfluid in the future experiment.
We study the phononic collective modes of the pairing field and their corresponding signature in both the order-parameter and density response functions for a superfluid Fermi gas at all temperatures below Tc in the collisionless regime. The spectra of collective modes are calculated within the Gaussian pair fluctuation approximation. We deal with the coupling of these modes to the fermionic continuum of quasiparticle-quasihole excitations by performing a nonperturbative analytic continuation of the pairing field propagator. At low temperature, we recover the known exponential temperature dependence of the damping rate and velocity shift of the Anderson-Bogoliubov branch. In the vicinity of Tc, we find analytically a weakly damped collective mode whose velocity vanishes with a critical exponent of 1/2, and whose quality factor diverges logarithmically with ${T}_{c}\ensuremath{-}T$, thereby clarifying an existing debate in the literature [Andrianov and Popov, Theor. Math. Phys. 28, 829 (1976); Ohashi and Takada, J. Phys. Soc. Jpn. 66, 2437 (1997)]. A transition between these two phononic branches is visible at intermediary temperatures, particularly in the BCS limit where the phase-phase response function displays two maxima.
We investigate the effects of pairing fluctuations in fermionic superfluids/superconductors where pairing occurs among three species (colors) of fermions. Such color superfluids/superconductors can be realized in three-component atomic Fermi gases and in dense quark matter. The superfluidity/superconductivity is characterized by a three-component order parameter which denotes the pairing among the three colors of fermions. Because of the SU(3) symmetry of the Hamiltonian, one color does not participate in pairing. This branch of fermionic excitation is gapless in the naive BCS mean-field description. In this paper, we adopt a pairing fluctuation theory to investigate the pairing fluctuation effects on the unpaired color in strongly coupled atomic color superfluids and quark color superconductors. At low temperature, a large pairing gap of the paired colors suppresses the pairing fluctuation effects for the unpaired color, and the spectral density of the unpaired color shows a single Fermi-liquid peak, which indicates the naive mean-field picture remains valid. As the temperature is increased, the spectral density of the unpaired color generally exhibits a three-peak structure: The Fermi-liquid peak remains but gets suppressed, and two pseudogaplike peaks appears. At and above the superfluid transition temperature, the Fermi-liquid peak disappears completely and all three colors exhibit pseudogaplike spectral density. The coexistence of Fermi liquid and pseudogap behavior is generic for both atomic color superfluids and quark color superconductors.