Synthetic Partial Waves in Ultracold Atomic Collisions

Williams, R. A.; LeBlanc, Lindsay J.; Jiménez-García, Karina; Beeler, Matthew; Perry, Abigail R.; Phillips, William D.; Spielman, I. B.

doi:10.1126/science.1212652

Cited by 134 publications

(174 citation statements)

References 24 publications

(35 reference statements)

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“…We now discuss the sharp distinction between our proposal to realize chiral p-wave superfluidity and that in previous studies [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18] . Our proposed chiral p-wave superfluid state is a centre-of-mass p-wave superconducting pairing state.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The key idea is a centre-of-mass p-wave superconducting pairing. Unlike the past models that require a p-wave two-body interaction or induced ones [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18] , the present pairing mechanism departs from the conventional reliance on p-wave pairing in relative motion. Here the pairing of fermions takes place between s and p orbitals, which have even and odd parity, respectively.…”

mentioning

confidence: 96%

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Chiral superfluidity with p-wave symmetry from an interacting s-wave atomic Fermi gas

Liu¹,

Li²,

Wu³

et al. 2014

Nat Commun

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Chiral p-wave superfluids are fascinating topological quantum states of matter that have been found in the liquid 3 He-A phase and arguably in the electronic Sr 2 RuO 4 superconductor. They are fundamentally related to the fractional 5/2 quantum Hall state, which supports fractional exotic excitations. Past studies show that they require spin-triplet pairing of fermions by p-wave interaction. Here we report that a p-wave chiral superfluid state can arise from spin-singlet pairing for an s-wave interacting atomic Fermi gas in an optical lattice. This p-wave state is conceptually distinct from all previous conventional p-wave states as it is for the centre-of-mass motion, instead of the relative motion. It leads to spontaneous generation of angular momentum, finite Chern numbers and topologically protected chiral fermionic zero modes bounded to domain walls, all occuring at a higher critical temperature in relative scales. Signature quantities are predicted for the cold atom experimental condition.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 96%

Chiral superfluidity with p-wave symmetry from an interacting s-wave atomic Fermi gas

Liu¹,

Li²,

Wu³

et al. 2014

Nat Commun

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“…Remarkably, this will be shown to result in a residual p-wave contact interaction between the fermions, analogous to the synthetic higher partial waves reported in ref. 28. This contribution can be enhanced, thanks to the resonant behaviour of the atom-atom scattering length in strongly confined 2D settings 9,10 as demonstrated recently in ultracold atomic systems [29][30][31] .…”

mentioning

confidence: 93%

Engineering p-wave interactions in ultracold atoms using nanoplasmonic traps

et al. 2013

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Engineering strong p-wave interactions between fermions is one of the challenges in modern quantum physics. Such interactions are responsible for a plethora of fascinating quantum phenomena, such as topological quantum liquids and exotic superconductors. Here we propose a method to generate these fermionic interactions by combining recent developments in nanoplasmonics with progress in realizing laser-induced gauge fields. Nanoplasmonics allows for strong confinement, leading to a geometric resonance in the atom-atom scattering. In combination with the laser coupling of the atomic states, this is shown to result in the desired interaction. We illustrate how this scheme can be used for the stabilization of strongly correlated fractional quantum Hall states in ultracold fermionic gases.

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“…At the mean-field level, spin-orbit coupled gases exhibit rich phase diagrams [4,[12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. Effects beyond mean-field theory [19][20][21][22], associated with the renormalization of interactions, are enhanced by the spin-orbit coupling, especially in the pure Rashba case, and can qualitatively change the mean-field results. Thus, the interplay between the spin-orbit coupling and the s-wave interaction is a crucial aspect of the many-body physics of such systems.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Harmonically trapped two-atom systems: Interplay of short-ranges-wave interaction and spin-orbit coupling

Yin

Gopalakrishnan²,

Blume

2014

Phys. Rev. A

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The coupling between the spin degrees of freedom and the orbital angular momentum has a profound effect on the properties of nuclei, atoms and condensed matter systems. Recently, synthetic gauge fields have been realized experimentally in neutral cold atom systems, giving rise to a spin-orbit coupling term with "strength" kso. This paper investigates the interplay between the single-particle spin-orbit coupling term of Rashba type and the short-range two-body s-wave interaction for cold atoms under external confinement. Specifically, we consider two different harmonically trapped two-atom systems. The first system consists of an atom with spin-orbit coupling that interacts with a structureless particle through a short-range two-body potential. The second system consists of two atoms that both feel the spin-orbit coupling term and that interact through a short-range two-body potential. Treating the spin-orbit term perturbatively, we determine the correction to the ground state energy for various generic parameter combinations. Selected excited states are also treated. An important aspect of our study is that the perturbative treatment is not limited to small s-wave scattering lengths but provides insights into the system behavior over a wide range of scattering lengths, including the strongly-interacting unitary regime. We find that the interplay between the spin-orbit coupling term and the s-wave interaction generically enters, depending on the exact parameter combinations of the s-wave scattering lengths, at order k 2 so or k 4 so for the ground state and leads to a shift of the energy of either sign. While the absence of a term proportional to kso follows straightforwardly from the functional form of the spin-orbit coupling term, the absence of a term proportional to k 2 so for certain parameter combinations is unexpected. The well-known fact that the spin-orbit coupling term couples the relative and center of mass degrees of freedom has interesting consequences for the trapped two-particle systems. For example, we find that the spin-orbit coupling term turns, for certain parameter combinations, sharp crossings into avoided crossings with an energy splitting proportional to kso. Our perturbative results are confirmed by numerical calculations that expand the eigenfunctions of the two-particle Hamiltonian in terms of basis functions that contain explicitly correlated Gaussians.

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Synthetic Partial Waves in Ultracold Atomic Collisions

Cited by 134 publications

References 24 publications

Chiral superfluidity with p-wave symmetry from an interacting s-wave atomic Fermi gas

Chiral superfluidity with p-wave symmetry from an interacting s-wave atomic Fermi gas

Engineering p-wave interactions in ultracold atoms using nanoplasmonic traps

Harmonically trapped two-atom systems: Interplay of short-ranges-wave interaction and spin-orbit coupling

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