We study the two-body and three-body bound states in ultracold atomic mixtures with one of the atoms subjected to an isotropic spin-orbit (SO) coupling. We consider a system of two identical fermions interacting with one SO coupled atom. It is found
that there can exist two types of three-body bound states, Efimov trimers and universal trimers. The Efimov trimers are energetically less favored by the SO coupling, which will finally merge into the atom-dimer threshold as increasing the SO coupling strength. Nevertheless, these trimers exhibit a new kind of discrete scaling law incorporating the SO coupling effect. On the other hand, the universal trimers are more favored by the SO coupling. They can be induced at negative s-wave scattering lengths and with smaller mass ratios than those without SO coupling. These results are obtained by both the Born-Oppenheimer approximation and exact solutions from three-body equations.
In this letter we address the issue how synthetic spin-orbit (SO) coupling can strongly affect three-body physics in ultracold atomic gases. We consider a system which consists of three fermionic atoms, including two spinless heavy atoms and one spin
-1/2 light atom subjected to an isotropic SO coupling. We find that SO coupling can induce universal three-body bound states with negative s-wave scattering length at a smaller mass ratio, where no trimer bound state can exist if in the absence of SO coupling. The energies of these trimers are independent of high-energy cutoff, and therefore they are universal ones. Moreover, the resulting atom-dimer resonance can be effectively controlled by SO coupling strength. Our results can be applied to systems like ${}^6$Li and ${}^{40}$K mixture.
It is known from the solution of the two-body problem that an anisotropic dipolar interaction can give rise to s-wave scattering resonances, which are named as dipolar interaction induced resonaces (DIIR). In this letter, we study zero-temperature ma
ny-body physics of a two-component Fermi gas across a DIIR. In the low-density regime, it is very striking that the resulting pairing order parameter is a nearly isotropic singlet pairing and the physics can be well described by an s-wave resonant interaction potential with finite range corrections, despite of the anisotropic nature of dipolar interaction. The pairing energy is as strong as a unitary Fermi gas nearby a magnetic Feshbach resonance. In the high density regime, the anisotropic effect plays an important role. We find phase transitions from singlet pairing to a state with mixed singlet and triplet pairing, and then from mixed pairing to pure triplet pairing. The state with mixed pairing spontaneously breaks the time-reversal symmetry.
We show that s-wave scattering resonances induced by dipolar interactions in a polar molecular gas have a universal large and positive effective range, which is very different from Feshbach resonances realized in cold atoms before, where the effectiv
e range is either negligible or negative. Such a difference has important consequence in many-body physics. At high temperature regime, a positive effective range gives rise to stronger repulsive interaction energy for positive scattering length, and weaker attractive interaction energy for negative scattering length. While at low-temperatures, we study polaron problem formed by single impurity molecule, and we find that the polaron binding energy increases at the BEC side and decreases at the BCS side. All these effects are in opposite to narrow Feshbach resonances where the effective range is negative.
