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arXiv:cond-mat/0508018 · Physical Review A

Critical currents in the BEC-BCS crossover regime in an optical lattice

Jacques Tempere, J. T. Devreese

Published Dec 1, 2005• 3 citations
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Abstract

Both the trapping geometry and the interatomic interaction strength of a dilute ultracold fermionic gas can be well controlled experimentally. Adapting the interaction strength between the fermionic atoms allows tuning the gas from a molecular condensate to a Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer superfluid. We adopt a functional integral point of view to investigate how the superfluid properties vary during this crossover. In particular, the critical superfluid velocity for flowing through an optical lattice is derived. The observation of undamped motion in an optical lattice constitutes a hallmark of superfluidity, also in the fermionic systems. We discuss our theoretical results for the critical velocity of a fermionic superfluid in comparison to the experimental results for a bosonic superfluid in an optical lattice.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.72.063601

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Both the trapping geometry and the interatomic interaction strength of a dilute ultracold fermionic gas can be well controlled experimentally. Adapting the interaction strength between the fermionic atoms allows tuning the gas from a molecular condensate to a Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer superfluid. We adopt a functional integral point of view to investigate how the superfluid properties vary during this crossover. In particular, the critical superfluid velocity for flowing through an optical lattice is derived. The observation of undamped motion in an optical lattice constitutes a hallmark of superfluidity, also in the fermionic systems. We discuss our theoretical results for the critical velocity of a fermionic superfluid in comparison to the experimental results for a bosonic superfluid in an optical lattice.
We study the effects of an external periodic potential on the critical velocity of a superfluid Fermi gas in the crossover between the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) phase and Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC). We numerically solve the Bogoliubov--de Gennes equations to model a three-dimensional gas of ultracold atoms in the superfluid phase flowing through a one-dimensional optical lattice. We find that when the recoil energy is comparable to the Fermi energy, the presence of the periodic potential reduces the effect of pair-breaking excitations. This behavior is a consequence of the peculiar band structure of the quasiparticle energy spectrum in the lattice. When the lattice height is much larger than the Fermi energy, the periodic potential makes pairs of atoms to be strongly bound, even in the BCS regime, and pair-breaking excitations are further suppressed. We have also found that when the recoil energy is comparable to or larger than the Fermi energy, the critical velocity due to long-wavelength phonon excitations shows a nonmonotonic behavior along the BCS-BEC crossover.
The BCS-BEC (Bose-Einstein condensation) crossover in a lattice is a powerful paradigm that describes how a superconductor deviates from the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer physics as the attractive interaction increases. Optical lattices loaded with binary mixtures of cold atoms allow one to access this phenomenon experimentally in a clean and controlled way. We show that, however, the possibility to study this phenomenon in actual cold-atoms experiments is limited by the effect of the trapping potential. Real-space dynamical mean-field theory calculations show indeed that interactions and the confining potential conspire to pack the fermions in the center of the trap, which approaches a band insulator when the attraction becomes sizeable. Interestingly, the energy gap is spatially more homogeneous than the superfluid condensate order parameter. We show how this physics reflects in several observables, and we propose an alternative strategy to disentangle the effect of the harmonic potential and measure the intrinsic properties resulting from the interaction strength.
Critical velocities have been observed in an ultracold superfluid Fermi gas throughout the BEC-BCS crossover. A pronounced peak of the critical velocity at unitarity demonstrates that superfluidity is most robust for resonant atomic interactions. Critical velocities were determined from the abrupt onset of dissipation when the velocity of a moving one-dimensional optical lattice was varied. The dependence of the critical velocity on lattice depth and on the inhomogeneous density profile was studied.
In our recent experiments at MIT, superfluidity has been observed in a strongly interacting atomic Fermi gas. These systems constitute a novel form of matter with model character: One can vary the temperature, density and dimensionality, the number of “spin up” versus “spin down” fermions, and, most remarkably, the interactions can be precisely controlled over an enormous range. This allows to study the crossover of a Bose-Einstein condensate of tightly bound molecules to a Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer superfluid of long-range Cooper pairs. Superfluidity in this crossover regime is demonstrated by setting the gas under rotation and observing ordered lattices of quantized vortices [1]. Thanks to its strong interactions, the gas is a high-temperature superfluid: Scaled to the density of electrons in a metal, superfluidity would occur already far above room temperature. A new regime is entered when the number of spin up versus spin down atoms is imbalanced. In this case, not every spin up atom can find a spin down partner. The ground state of such a system has been under debate for over 40 years. We observe the breakdown of superfluidity at a critical imbalance, the Chandrasekhar-Clogston limit [2]. The superfluid gives way to an intriguing, strongly-interacting Fermi gas with unequal spin populations [3, 4].
We analyze the finite temperature phase diagram of fermion mixtures in one-dimensional optical lattices as a function of interaction strength. At low temperatures, the system evolves from an anisotropic three-dimensional Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superfluid to an effectively two-dimensional Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) superfluid as the interaction strength increases. We calculate the critical temperature as a function of interaction strength, and identify the region where the dimensional crossover occurs for a specified optical lattice potential. Finally, we show that the dominant vortex excitations near the critical temperature evolve from multiplane elliptical vortex loops in the three-dimensional regime to planar vortex-antivortex pairs in the two-dimensional regime, and we propose a detection scheme for these excitations.