Renormalization group approach to spinor Bose-Fermi mixtures in a shallow optical lattice

We study a mixture of ultracold spin-half fermionic and spin-one bosonic atoms in a shallow optical lattice where the bosons are coupled to the fermions via both density-density and spin-spin interactions. We consider the parameter regime where the bosons are in a superfluid ground state, integrate them out, and obtain an effective action for the fermions. We carry out a renormalization group analysis of this effective fermionic action at low temperatures, show that the presence of the spinor bosons may lead to a separation of Fermi surfaces of the spin-up and spin-down fermions, and investigate the parameter range where this phenomenon occurs. We also calculate the susceptibilities corresponding to the possible superfluid instabilities of the fermions and obtain their possible broken-symmetry ground states at low temperatures and weak interactions.

Spontaneous spin accumulation in singlet-triplet Josephson junctions

We study the Andreev bound states in a Josephson junction between a singlet and a triplet superconductors. Because of the mismatch in the spin symmetries of pairing, the energies of the spin up and down quasiparticles are generally different. This results in imbalance of spin populations and net spin accumulation at the junction in equilibrium. This effect can be detected using probes of local magnetic field, such as the scanning SQUID, Hall, and Kerr probes. It may help to identify potential triplet pairing in $rm(TMTSF)_2X$, $rm Sr_2RuO_4$, and oxypnictides.

Phases and collective modes of hardcore Bose-Fermi mixture in an optical lattice

We obtain the phase diagram of a Bose-Fermi mixture of hardcore spinless Bosons and spin-polarized Fermions with nearest neighbor intra-species interaction and on-site inter-species repulsion in an optical lattice at half-filling using a slave-boson mean-field theory. We show that such a system can have four possible phases which are a) supersolid Bosons coexisting with Fermions in the Mott state, b) Mott state of Bosons coexisting with Fermions in a metallic or charge-density wave state, c) a metallic Fermionic state coexisting with superfluid phase of Bosons, and d) Mott insulating state of Fermions and Bosons. We chart out the phase diagram of the system and provide analytical expressions for the phase boundaries within mean-field theory. We demonstrate that the transition between these phases are generically first order with the exception of that between the supersolid and the Mott states which is a continuous quantum phase transition. We also obtain the low-energy collective excitations of the system in these phases. Finally, we study the particle-hole excitations in the Mott insulating phase and use it to determine the dynamical critical exponent $z$ for the supersolid-Mott insulator transition. We discuss experiments which can test our theory.

Theory of defect production in nonlinear quench across a quantum critical point

We study defect production in a quantum system subjected to a nonlinear power law quench which takes it either through a quantum critical or multicritical point or along a quantum critical line. We elaborate on our earlier work [D. Sen, K. Sengupta, S. Mondal, prl 101, 016806 (2008)] and present a detailed analysis of the scaling of the defect density $n$ with the quench rate $tau$ and exponent $al$ for each of the above-mentioned cases. We also compute the correlation functions for defects generated in nonlinear quenches through a quantum critical point and discuss the dependence of the amplitudes of such correlation functions on the exponent $al$. We discuss several experimental systems where these theoretical predictions can be tested.

Defect production in non-linear quench across a quantum critical point

We show that the defect density $n$, for a slow non-linear power-law quench with a rate $tau^{-1}$ and an exponent $alpha>0$, which takes the system through a critical point characterized by correlation length and dynamical critical exponents $ u$ and $z$, scales as $n sim tau^{-alpha u d/ (alpha z u+1)}$ [$n sim (alpha g^{(alpha-1)/alpha}/tau)^{ u d/(z u+1)}$], if the quench takes the system across the critical point at time $t=0$ [$t=t_0 e 0$], where $g$ is a non-universal constant and $d$ is the system dimension. These scaling laws constitute the first theoretical results for defect production in non-linear quenches across quantum critical points and reproduce their well-known counterpart for linear quench ($alpha=1$) as a special case. We supplement our results with numerical studies of well-known models and suggest experiments to test our theory.

Theory of tunneling conductance of graphene NIS junctions

We calculate the tunneling conductance of a graphene normal metal-insulator-superconductor (NIS) junction with a barrier of thickness $d$ and with an arbitrary voltage $V_0$ applied across the barrier region. We demonstrate that the tunneling conductance of such a NIS junction is an oscillatory function of both $d$ and $V_0$. We also show that the periodicity and amplitude of such oscillations deviate from their universal values in the thin barrier limit as obtained in earlier work [Phys. Rev. Lett. {bf 97}, 217001 (2006)] and become a function of the applied voltage $V_0$. Our results reproduces the earlier results on tunneling conductance of such junctions in the thin [Phys. Rev. Lett. {bf 97}, 217001 (2006)] and zero [Phys. Rev. Lett. {bf 97}, 067007 (2006)] barrier limits as special limiting cases. We discuss experimental relevance of our results.