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arXiv:cond-mat/0504511 · Physical Review A

Pairing in a two-component ultracold Fermi gas: Phases with broken-space symmetries

Armen Sedrakian, Jordi Mur-Petit, A. Polls, H. Müther

Published Jul 22, 2005• 101 citations
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Abstract

We explore the phase diagram of a two-component ultracold atomic Fermi gas interacting with zero-range forces in the limit of weak coupling. We focus on the dependence of the pairing gap and the free energy on the variations in the number densities of the two species while the total density of the system is held fixed. As the density asymmetry is increased, the system exhibits a transition from a homogenous Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) phase to phases with spontaneously broken global space symmetries. One such realization is the deformed Fermi surface superfluidity (DFS) which exploits the possibility of deforming the Fermi surfaces of the species into ellipsoidal form at zero total momentum of Cooper pairs. The critical asymmetries at which the transition from DFS to the unpaired state occurs are larger than those for the BCS phase. In this precritical region the DFS phase lowers the pairing energy of the asymmetric BCS state. We compare quantitatively the DFS phase to another realization of superconducting phases with broken translational symmetry: the single-plane-wave Larkin-Ovchinnikov-Fulde-Ferrell phase, which is characterized by a nonvanishing center-of-mass momentum of the Cooper pairs. The possibility of the detection of the DFS phase in the time-of-flight experiments is discussed and quantified for the case of $^{6}\mathrm{Li}$ atoms trapped in two different hyperfine states.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.72.013613

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We explore the phase diagram of a two-component ultracold atomic Fermi gas interacting with zero-range forces in the limit of weak coupling. We focus on the dependence of the pairing gap and the free energy on the variations in the number densities of the two species while the total density of the system is held fixed. As the density asymmetry is increased, the system exhibits a transition from a homogenous Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) phase to phases with spontaneously broken global space symmetries. One such realization is the deformed Fermi surface superfluidity (DFS) which exploits the possibility of deforming the Fermi surfaces of the species into ellipsoidal form at zero total momentum of Cooper pairs. The critical asymmetries at which the transition from DFS to the unpaired state occurs are larger than those for the BCS phase. In this precritical region the DFS phase lowers the pairing energy of the asymmetric BCS state. We compare quantitatively the DFS phase to another realization of superconducting phases with broken translational symmetry: the single-plane-wave Larkin-Ovchinnikov-Fulde-Ferrell phase, which is characterized by a nonvanishing center-of-mass momentum of the Cooper pairs. The possibility of the detection of the DFS phase in the time-of-flight experiments is discussed and quantified for the case of 6Li^{6}\mathrm{Li}6Li atoms trapped in two different hyperfine states.
We discuss the superfluid phase transition of a strongly interacting Fermi gas with unequal (asymmetric) chemical potentials in two pairing hyperfine states, and map out its phase diagram near the BCS-BEC crossover. Our approach includes the fluctuation contributions of "preformed Cooper pairs" to the thermodynamic potential at finite temperature. We show that, below a critical difference in chemical potentials between species, a normal gas is unstable towards the formation of either a finite-momentum paired Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov superconducting phase or a uniform superfluid, depending on the asymmetry and interaction strengths. We determine the value of critical chemical potential mismatch, and find that it is consistent with a recent measurement by Zwierlein et al. ( Science , 311 (2006) 492).
The superfluid transition in an ultracold two-component atomic Fermi gas is analyzed in the case where the two components have different densities. We describe a superfluid state which spontaneously breaks the rotational-symmetry by deforming the Fermi surfaces of both species into ellipsoidal form. At relatively large hyperfine-spin asymmetries, this deformation is shown to help the appearance of pairing, which in the rotationally-symmetric (BCS) case would be forbidden by Pauli blocking. The prospects for experimental detection of such a deformed Fermi surface phase are discussed.
We in this paper investigate the phase diagram associated with the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer--Bose-Einstein-condensate (BCS-BEC) crossover of a three-component ultracold superfluid Fermi gas of different chemical potentials and equal masses in two dimensions. The gap-order parameter and number densities are found analytically by using the functional-path-integral method. The balance of pairing will be broken in the free space due to the unequal chemical potentials. We obtain the same particle-number density and condensed fraction in the BCS-superfluid phase as those in a recent paper [Phys. Rev. A 83, 033630 (2011)] while the Sarma phase of the coexistence of normal and superfluid Fermi gases is characteristic of an inhomogeneous system. The minimum ratio of the BCS-superfluid phase becomes 1/3 in the BCS limit corresponding to the zero ratio in the two-component system in which the critical point of phase separation is ${\ensuremath{\epsilon}}_{B}/{\ensuremath{\epsilon}}_{F}=2$, but it becomes 3 in the three-component case.
We investigate the pairing physics of a three-component spin-orbit coupled Fermi gas in two spatial dimensions. The three atomic hyperfine states of the system are coupled by the recently realized synthetic spin-orbit coupling (SOC), which mixes different hyperfine states into helicity branches in a momentum-dependent manner. As a consequence, the interplay of spin-orbit coupling and the hyperfine-state-dependent interactions leads to the emergence of Fulde-Ferrell (FF) pairing states with finite center-of-mass momenta even in the absence of the Fermi-surface asymmetry that is usually mandatory to stabilize an SOC-induced FF state. We show that, for different combinations of spin-dependent interactions, the ground state of the system can either be the conventional Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer pairing state with zero center-of-mass momentum or be the FF pairing states. Of particular interest here is the existence of a three-component FF pairing state in which every two out of the three components form FF pairing. We map out the phase diagram of the system and characterize the properties of the three-component FF state, such as the order parameters, the gapless contours, and the momentum distributions. Based on these results, we discuss possible experimental detection schemes for the interesting pairing states in the system.
We investigated possible superfluid phases at finite temperature in a two-component Fermi gas with density imbalance. In the frame of a general four-fermion interaction theory, we solved in the BCS region the gap equations for the pairing gap and pairing momentum under the restriction of fixed number densities and analyzed the stability of different phases by calculating the superfluid density and number susceptibilities. The homogeneous superfluid is stable only at high temperature and low number asymmetry, the inhomogeneous Larkin-Ovchinnikov-Fudde-Ferrell state survives at low temperature and high number asymmetry, and in between them there exists another possible inhomogeneous phase, that of phase separation. The critical temperatures and the orders of the phase transitions among the superfluid phases and normal phase are calculated analytically and numerically. The phase diagram we obtained in the temperature and number asymmetry plane is quite different from the one in the temperature and chemical potential difference plane for a system with fixed chemical potentials.
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.