No Arabic abstract
We review the study of the superfluid phase transition in a system of fermions whose interaction can be tuned continuously along the crossover from Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superconducting phase to a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), also in the presence of a spin-orbit coupling. Below a critical temperature the system is characterized by an order parameter. Generally a mean field approximation cannot reproduce the correct behavior of the critical temperature $T_c$ over the whole crossover. We analyze the crucial role of quantum fluctuations beyond the mean-field approach useful to find $T_c$ along the crossover in the presence of a spin-orbit coupling, within a path integral approach. A formal and detailed derivation for the set of equations useful to derive $T_c$ is performed in the presence of Rashba, Dresselhaus and Zeeman couplings. In particular in the case of only Rashba coupling, for which the spin-orbit effects are more relevant, the two-body bound state exists for any value of the interaction, namely in the full crossover. As a result the effective masses of the emerging bosonic excitations are finite also in the BCS regime.
We develop a microscopic model to describe the Josephson dynamics between two superfluid reservoirs of ultracold fermionic atoms which accounts for the dependence of the critical current on both the barrier height and the interaction strength along the crossover from BCS to BEC. Building on a previous study [F. Meier & W. Zwerger, Phys. Rev. A, 64 033610 (2001)] of weakly-interacting bosons, we derive analytic results for the Josephson critical current at zero temperature for homogeneous and trapped systems at arbitrary coupling. The critical current exhibits a maximum near the unitarity limit which arises from the competition between the increasing condensate fraction and a decrease of the chemical potential along the evolution from the BCS to the BEC limit. Our results agree quantitatively with numerical simulations and recent experimental data.
In this work, we study the BCS-BEC crossover and quantum phase transition in a Fermi gas under Rashba spin-orbit coupling close to a Feshbach resonance. By adopting a two-channel model, we take into account of the closed channel molecules, and show that combined with spin-orbit coupling, a finite background scattering in the open channel can lead to two branches of solution for both the two-body and the many-body ground states. The branching of the two-body bound state solution originates from the avoided crossing between bound states in the open and the closed channels, respectively. For the many-body states, we identify a quantum phase transition in the upper branch regardless of the sign of the background scattering length, which is in clear contrast to the case without spin-orbit coupling. For systems with negative background scattering length in particular, we show that the bound state in the open channel, and hence the quantum phase transition in the upper branch, are induced by spin-orbit coupling. We then characterize the critical detuning of the quantum phase transition for both positive and negative background scattering lengths, and demonstrate the optimal parameters for the critical point to be probed experimentally.
We investigate the phase diagram of two-component fermions in the BCS-BEC crossover. Using functional renormalization group equations we calculate the effect of quantum fluctuations on the fermionic self-energy parametrized by a wavefunction renormalization, an effective Fermi radius and the gap. This allows us to follow the modifications of the Fermi surface and the dispersion relation for fermionic excitations throughout the whole crossover region. We also determine the critical temperature of the second order phase transition to superfluidity. Our results are in agreement with BCS theory including Gorkovs correction for small negative scattering length a and with an interacting Bose gas for small positive a. At the unitarity point the result for the gap at zero temperature agrees well with Quantum-Monte-Carlo simulations while the critical temperature differs.
We determine the size of the critical region of the superfluid transition in the BCS-BEC crossover of a three-dimensional fermion gas, using a renormalization-group approach to a bosonic theory of pairing fluctuations. For the unitary Fermi gas, we find a sizable critical region $[T_G^-,T_G^+]$, of order $T_c$, around the transition temperature $T_c$ with a pronounced asymmetry: $|T_G^+-T_c|/|T_G^--T_c|sim8$. The critical region is strongly suppressed on the BCS side of the crossover but remains important on the BEC side.
The recent experimental realization of spin-orbit coupled Fermi gases provides a unique opportunity to study the interplay between strong interaction and SOC in a tunable, disorder-free system. We present here precision ab initio numerical results on the two-dimensional, unpolarized, uniform Fermi gas with attractive interactions and Rashba SOC. Using auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo and incorporating recent algorithmic advances, we carry out exact calculations on sufficiently large system sizes to provide accurate results systematically as a function of experimental parameters. We obtain the equation of state, the momentum distributions, the pseudo-spin correlations and the pairing wave functions. Our results help illuminate the rich pairing structure induced by SOC, and provide benchmarks for theory and guidance to future experimental efforts.