No Arabic abstract
We investigate how the vortex-vortex separation changes Majorana zero modes in the vicinity of the BCS-BEC (Bose-Einstein condensation) topological phase transition of p-wave resonant Fermi gases. By analytically and numerically solving the Bogoliubov-de Gennes equation for spinless p-wave superfluids with plural vortices, it is demonstrated that the quasiparticle tunneling between neighboring vortices gives rise to the quantum oscillation of the low-lying spectra on the scale of the Fermi wavelength in addition to the exponential splitting. This rapid oscillation, which appears in the weak coupling regime as a consequence of quantum oscillations of quasiparticle wave functions, disappears in the vicinity of the BCS-BEC topological phase transition. This is understandable from that the wave function of the Majorana zero modes is described by the modified Bessel function in the strong coupling regime and thus it becomes spread over the vortex core region. Due to the exponential divergence of the modified Bessel function, the concrete realization of the Majorana zero modes near the topological phase transition requires the neighboring vortices to be separated beyond the length scale defined by the coherence length and the dimensionless coupling constant. All these behaviors are also confirmed by carrying out the full numerical diagonalization of the non-local Bogoliubov-de Gennes equation in a two dimensional geometry. Furthermore, this argument is expanded into the case of three-vortex systems, where a pair of core-bound and edge-bound Majorana states survive at zero energy state regardless of the vortex separation.
Multiply quantized vortices in the BCS-to-BEC evolution of p-wave resonant Fermi gases are investigated theoretically. The vortex structure and the low-energy quasiparticle states are discussed, based on the self-consistent calculations of the Bogoliubov-de Gennes and gap equations. We reveal the direct relation between the macroscopic structure of vortices, such as particle densities, and the low-lying quasiparticle state. In addition, the net angular momentum for multiply quantized vortices with a vorticity $kappa$ is found to be expressed by a simple equation, which reflects the chirality of the Cooper pairing. Hence, the observation of the particle density depletion and the measurement of the angular momentum will provide the information on the core-bound state and $p$-wave superfluidity. Moreover, the details on the zero energy Majorana state are discussed in the vicinity of the BCS-to-BEC evolution. It is demonstrated numerically that the zero energy Majorana state appears in the weak coupling BCS limit only when the vortex winding number is odd. There exist the $kappa$ branches of the core bound states for a vortex state with vorticity $kappa$, whereas only one of them can be the zero energy. This zero energy state vanishes at the BCS-BEC topological phase transition, because of interference between the core-bound and edge-bound states.
The pairing of fermionic atoms in a mixture of atomic fermion and boson gases at zero temperature is investigated. The attractive interaction between fermions, that can be induced by density fluctuations of the bosonic background, can give rise to a superfluid phase in the Fermi component of the mixture. The atoms of both species are assumed to be in only one internal state, so that the pairing of fermions is effective only in odd-l channels. No assumption about the value of the ratio between the Fermi velocity and the sound velocity in the Bose gas is made in the derivation of the energy gap equation. The gap equation is solved without any particular ansatz for the pairing field or the effective interaction. The p-wave superfluidity is studied in detail. By increasing the strength and/or decreasing the range of the effective interaction a transition of the fermion pairing regime, from the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer state to a system of tightly bound couples can be realized. These composite bosons behave as a weakly-interacting Bose-Einstein condensate.
Strongly correlated Fermi systems with pairing interactions become superfluid below a critical temperature $T_c$. The extent to which such pairing correlations alter the behavior of the liquid at temperatures $T > T_c$ is a subtle issue that remains an area of debate, in particular regarding the appearance of the so-called pseudogap in the BCS-BEC crossover of unpolarized spin-$1/2$ nonrelativistic matter. To shed light on this, we extract several quantities of crucial importance at and around the unitary limit, namely: the odd-even staggering of the total energy, the spin susceptibility, the pairing correlation function, the condensate fraction, and the critical temperature $T_c$, using a non-perturbative, constrained-ensemble quantum Monte Carlo algorithm.
We investigate the topological properties of spin polarized fermionic polar molecules loaded in a multi-layer structure with the electric dipole moment polarized to the normal direction. When polar molecules are paired by attractive inter-layer interaction, unpaired Majorana fermions can be macroscopically generated in the top and bottom layers in dilute density regime. We show that the resulting topological state is effectively composed by a bundle of 1D Kitaev ladders labeled by in-plane momenta k and -k, and hence belongs to BDI class characterized by the winding number Z, protected by the time reversal symmetry. The Majorana surface modes exhibit a flatband at zero energy, fully gapped from Bogoliubov excitations in the bulk, and hence becomes an idea system to investigate the interaction effects on quantum degenerate Majorana fermions. We further show that additional interference fringes can be identified as a signature of such 2D Majorana surface modes in the time-of-flight experiment.
We investigate the macroscopic quantum tunneling of fermionic superfluids in the two-dimensional BCS-BEC crossover by using an effective tunneling energy which explicitly depends on the condensate fraction and the chemical potential of the system. We compare the mean-field effective tunneling energy with the beyond-mean-field one finding that the mean-field tunneling energy is not reliable in the BEC regime of the crossover. Then we solve the Josephson equations of the population imbalance and the relative phase calculating the frequency of tunneling oscillation both in the linear regime and in the nonlinear one. Our results show that the Josephson frequency is larger in the intermediate regime of the BCS-BEC crossover due to the peculiar behavior of the effective tunneling energy in the crossover.