No Arabic abstract
We study the Higgs amplitude mode in the s-wave superfluid state on the honeycomb lattice inspired by recent cold atom experiments. We consider the attractive Hubbard model and focus on the vicinity of a quantum phase transition between semi-metal and superfluid phases. On either side of the transition, we find collective mode excitations that are stable against decay into quasiparticle-pairs. In the semi-metal phase, the collective modes have Cooperon and exciton character. These modes smoothly evolve across the quantum phase transition, and become the Anderson-Bogoliubov mode and the Higgs mode of the superfluid phase. The collective modes are accommodated within a window in the quasiparticle-pair continuum, which arises as a consequence of the linear Dirac dispersion on the honeycomb lattice, and allows for sharp collective excitations. Bragg scattering can be used to measure these excitations in cold atom experiments, providing a rare example wherein collective modes can be tracked across a quantum phase transition.
We present real-space dynamical mean-field theory calculations for attractively interacting fermions in three-dimensional lattices with elongated traps. The critical polarization is found to be 0.8, regardless of the trap elongation. Below the critical polarization, we find unconventional superfluid structures where the polarized superfluid and Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov-type states emerge across the entire core region.
Motivated by recent experiments on atomic Dirac fermions in a tunable honeycomb optical lattice, we study the attractive Hubbard model of superfluidity in the anisotropic honeycomb lattice. At weak-coupling, we find that the maximum mean field pairing transition temperature, as a function of density and interaction strength, occurs for the case with isotropic hopping amplitudes. In this isotropic case, we go beyond mean field theory and study collective fluctuations, treating both pairing and density fluctuations for interaction strengths ranging from weak to strong coupling. We find evidence for a sharp sound mode, together with a well-defined Leggett mode over a wide region of the phase diagram. We also calculate the superfluid order parameter and collective modes in the presence of nonzero superfluid flow. The flow-induced softening of these collective modes leads to dynamical instabilities involving stripe-like density modulations as well as a Leggett-mode instability associated with the natural sublattice symmetry breaking charge-ordered state on the honeycomb lattice. The latter provides a non-trivial test for the experimental realization of the one-band Hubbard model. We delineate regimes of the phase diagram where the critical current is limited by depairing or by such collective instabilities, and discuss experimental implications of our results.
Atomic Fermi gases provide an ideal platform for studying the pairing and superfluid physics, using a Feshbach resonance between closed channel molecular states and open channel scattering states. Of particular interest is the strongly interacting regime. We show that the closed-channel fraction $Z$ provides an effective probe for the important many-body interacting effects, especially through its density dependence, which is absent from two-body theoretical predictions. Here we measure $Z$ as a function of interaction strength and the Fermi temperature $T_F$ in a trapped $^6$Li superfluid throughout the entire BCS--BEC crossover. Away from the deep BEC regime, the fraction $Z$ is sensitive to $T_F$. In particular, our data show $Z propto T_F^{alpha}$ with $alpha=1/2$ at unitarity, in quantitative agreement with calculations of a two-channel pairing fluctuation theory, and $alpha$ increases rapidly into the BCS regime, reflecting many-body interaction effects as predicted.
We consider the density response of a trapped two-component Fermi gas. Combining the Bogoliubov-deGennes method with the random phase approximation allows the study of both collective and single particle excitations. Calculating the density response across a wide range of interactions, we observe a crossover from a weakly interacting pair vibration mode to a strongly interacting Goldstone mode. The crossover is associated with a depressed collective mode frequency and an increased damping rate, in agreement with density response experiments performed in strongly interacting atomic gases.
Our goal is to understand the phenomena arising in optical lattice fermions at low temperature in an external magnetic field. Varying the field, the attraction between any two fermions can be made arbitrarily strong, where composite bosons form via so-called Feshbach resonances. By setting up strong-coupling equations for fermions, we find that in spatial dimension $d>2$ they couple to bosons which dress up fermions and lead to new massive composite fermions. At low enough temperature, we obtain the critical temperature at which composite bosons undergo the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), leading to BEC-dressing massive fermions. These form tightly bound pair states which are new bosonic quasi-particles producing a BEC-type condensate. A quantum critical point is found and the formation of condensates of complex quasi-particles is speculated over.