Tuesday, April 16, 2013

1304.3926 (Chunlei Qu et al.)

FFLO or Majorana superfluids: Quantum phases of fermionic cold atoms in
spin-orbit coupled optical lattices
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Chunlei Qu, Ming Gong, Chuanwei Zhang
The recent experimental realization of spin-orbit coupling (SOC) for ultra-cold atoms opens a completely new avenue for exploring new quantum matter. In experiments, the SOC is implemented simultaneously with a Zeeman field. Such spin-orbit coupled Fermi gases are predicted to support Majorana fermions with non-Abelian exchange statistics in one dimension (1D). However, as shown in recent theory and experiments for 1D spin-imbalanced Fermi gases, the Zeeman field can lead to the long-sought Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) superfluids with non-zero momentum Cooper pairings, in contrast to the zero momentum pairing in Majorana superfluids. Therefore a natural question to ask is which phase, FFLO or Majorana superfluids, will survive in spin-orbit coupled Fermi gases in the presence of a large Zeeman field. In this paper, we address this question by studying the mean field quantum phases of 1D spin-orbit coupled fermionic cold atom optical lattices.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.3926

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