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arXiv:cond-mat/0608454 · Physical Review A

Stability conditions and phase diagrams for two-component Fermi gases with population imbalance

Qijin Chen, Yan He, Chih-Chun Chien, Kathryn Levin

Published Dec 4, 2006• 39 citations
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Abstract

Superfluidity in atomic Fermi gases with population imbalance has recently become an exciting research focus. There is considerable disagreement in the literature about the appropriate stability conditions for states in the phase diagram throughout the BCS to Bose-Einstein condensation crossover. Here we discuss these stability conditions for homogeneous polarized superfluid phases, and compare with recent alternative proposals. The requirement of a positive second-order partial derivative of the thermodynamic potential with respect to the fermionic excitation gap $\ensuremath{\Delta}$ (at fixed chemical potentials) is demonstrated to be equivalent to the positive definiteness of the particle number susceptibility matrix. In addition, we show the positivity of the effective pair mass constitutes another nontrivial stability condition. These conditions determine the (local) stability of the system towards phase separation (or other ordered phases). We also study systematically the effects of finite temperature and the related pseudogap on the phase diagrams defined by our stability conditions.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.74.063603

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Superfluidity in atomic Fermi gases with population imbalance has recently become an exciting research focus. There is considerable disagreement in the literature about the appropriate stability conditions for states in the phase diagram throughout the BCS to Bose-Einstein condensation crossover. Here we discuss these stability conditions for homogeneous polarized superfluid phases, and compare with recent alternative proposals. The requirement of a positive second-order partial derivative of the thermodynamic potential with respect to the fermionic excitation gap \ensuremathΔ\ensuremath{\Delta}\ensuremathΔ (at fixed chemical potentials) is demonstrated to be equivalent to the positive definiteness of the particle number susceptibility matrix. In addition, we show the positivity of the effective pair mass constitutes another nontrivial stability condition. These conditions determine the (local) stability of the system towards phase separation (or other ordered phases). We also study systematically the effects of finite temperature and the related pseudogap on the phase diagrams defined by our stability conditions.
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.
In this paper we present a very general theoretical framework for addressing fermionic superfluids over the entire range of BCS to Bose Einstein condensation (BEC) crossover in the presence of population imbalance or spin polarization. Our emphasis is on providing a theory which reduces to the standard zero temperature mean-field theories in the literature, but necessarily includes pairing fluctuation effects at nonzero temperature within a consistent framework. Physically, these effects are associated with the presence of preformed pairs (or a fermionic pseudogap) in the normal phase, and pair excitations of the condensate, in the superfluid phase. We show how this finite TTT theory of fermionic pair condensates bears many similarities to the condensation of point bosons. In the process we examine three different types of condensate: the usual breached pair or Sarma phase and both the one- and two-plane-wave Larkin-Ovchinnikov-Fulde-Ferrell (LOFF) states. The last of these has been discussed in the literature albeit only within a Landau-Ginzburg formalism, generally valid near Tc{T}_{c}Tc​. Here we show how to arrive at the two-plane-wave LOFF state in the ground state as well as at general temperature TTT.
We determine the superfluid transition temperature Tc{T}_{c}Tc​ and related finite temperature phase diagrams for the entire BCS--Bose-Einstein-condensation crossover in a three-dimensional homogeneous mixture of 6Li^{6}\text{L}\text{i}6Li and 40K^{40}\text{K}40K atoms with population imbalance. Our work is motivated by the recent observation of an interspecies Feshbach resonance. Pairing fluctuation effects, which significantly reduce Tc{T}_{c}Tc​ from the onset temperature for pairing $({T}^{\ensuremath{\ast}})$, provide reasonable estimates of Tc{T}_{c}Tc​ and indicate that the interspecies superfluid phase should be accessible in future experiments. Although a homogeneous polarized superfluid is not stable in the ground state near unitarity, our phase diagrams show that it stabilizes at finite temperature.
We investigate a two-component Fermi gas with unequal spin populations along the BCS-BEC crossover. By using the extended BCS equations and the concept of off-diagonal-long-range-order we derive a formula for the condensate number of Cooper pairs as a function of energy gap, average chemical potential, imbalance chemical potential and temperature. Then we study the zero-temperature condensate fraction of Cooper pairs by varying interaction strength and polarization, finding a depletion of the condensate fraction by increasing the population imbalance. We also consider explicitly the presence of an external harmonic confinement and we study, within the local-density approximation, the phase separation between superfluid and normal phase regions of the polarized fermionic cloud. In particular, we calculate both condensate density profiles and total density profiles from the inner superfluid core to the normal region passing for the interface, where a finite jump in the density is a clear manifestation of this phase-separated regime. Finally, we compare our theoretical results with the available experimental data on the condensate fraction of polarized 6Li atoms [Science 311, 492 (2006)]. These experimental data are in reasonable agreement with our predictions in a suitable range of polarizations, but only in the BCS side of the crossover up to unitarity.
We investigate the temperature effects in an imbalanced superfluid atomic Fermi gas. We consider a bilayer system of two-component dipolar fermionic atoms with one layer containing atoms of one component and the other layer the atoms of other component with an imbalance between the populations of the two components. This imbalance results in uniform and nonuniform superfluid phases such as phase-separated BCS, Fulde-Ferrel-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO), Sarma and normal Fermi liquid phases for different system parameters. Using the mean-field BCS theory together with the superfluid mass-density criterion we classify different phases in thermodynamic phase diagram. Our results indicate that for a dipolar Fermi system the Sarma phase is stable for large imbalance at finite temperature below the critical temperature, and the FFLO phase is stable for intermediate imbalance on the BCS side of a BCS-BCE crossover. The phase diagram in the temperature and population imbalance plane indicate three Lifshitz points: one corresponding to coexistance of BCS, FFLO and normal Fermi liquid phase while the other two correspond to the coexistance of the Sarma phase, FFLO phase and normal Fermi phase for dipolar interactions.
Abstract Finite-temperature phase structures for asymmetric two-component D-wave fermion superfluids in the weak coupling BCS regime are investigated. The Fulde–Ferrell–Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) state becomes non-degenerate with the orientation of Cooper pair momentum due to the anisotropic pairing gap for D-wave pairing. The new parameter θ 0, corresponding to the orientation of Cooper pair momentum, greatly enriches the phase structures. Especially, the phase separation (PS) region in the phase diagram is significantly reduced comparing to that for S-wave pairing. Theoretically, the stability condition of solutions is equivalent to the positive definite Hessian matrix of free energy in the hyperplane defined by the number density constraints in the parameter space spanned by the average chemical potential μ, relative chemical potential h, paring gap Δ, pair momentum q, and θ 0. In addition, the stability condition of the superfluid density is essentially included in the positive definite Hessian matrix. Moreover, the positiveness of imbalance number susceptibility D δ ρ / D h is always equivalent to the positiveness of the smaller eigenvalue λ − of the number susceptibility matrix. While the criteria ∂2Ω/∂Δ2 and ∂ 2 Ω ∂ Δ 2 ∂ 2 Ω ∂ q 2 − ∂ 2 Ω ∂ Δ ∂ q 2 against PS in previous studies are equivalent to λ − only under the prerequisite that the solution is a local minimum in the corresponding hyperplane.