Thermodynamic Properties of Rashba Spin-Orbit-Coupled Fermi Gas

We investigate the thermodynamic properties of a superfluid Fermi gas subject to Rashba spin-orbit coupling and effective Zeeman field. We adopt a T-matrix scheme that takes beyond-mean-field effects, which are important for strongly interacting systems, into account. We focus on the calculation of two important quantities: the superfluid transition temperature and the isothermal compressibility. Our calculation shows very distinct influences of the out-of-plane and the in-plane Zeeman fields on the Fermi gas. We also confirm that the in-plane Zeeman field induces a Fulde-Ferrell superfluid below the critical temperature and an exotic finite-momentum pseudo-gap phase above the critical temperature.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figure

Effective p-wave interaction and topological superfluids in s-wave quantum gases

P-wave interaction in cold atoms may give rise to exotic topological superfluids. However, the realization of p-wave interaction in cold atom system is experimentally challenging. Here we propose a simple scheme to synthesize effective $p$-wave interaction in conventional $s$-wave interacting quantum gases. The key idea is to load atoms into spin-dependent optical lattice potential. Using two concrete examples involving spin-1/2 fermions, we show how the original system can be mapped into a model describing spinless fermions with nearest neighbor p-wave interaction, whose ground state can be a topological superfluid that supports Majorana fermions under proper conditions. Our proposal has the advantage that it does not require spin-orbit coupling or loading atoms onto higher orbitals, which is the key in earlier proposals to synthesize effective $p$-wave interaction in $s$-wave quantum gases, and may provide a completely new route for realizing $p$-wave topological superfluids.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Bichromatic field generation from double-four-wave mixing in a double-electromagnetically induced transparency system

We demonstrate the double electromagnetically induced transparency (double-EIT) and double four-wave mixing (double-FWM) based on a new scheme of non-degenerate four-wave mixing (FWM) involving five levels of a cold 85Rb atomic ensemble, in which the double-EIT windows are used to transmit the probe field and enhance the third-order nonlinear susceptibility. The phase-matching conditions for both four-wave mixings could be satisfied simultaneously. The frequency of one component of the generated bichromatic field is less than the other by the ground-state hyperfine splitting (3GHz). This specially designed experimental scheme for simultaneously generating different nonlinear wave-mixing processes is expected to find applications in quantum information processing and cross phase modulation. Our results agree well with the theoretical simulation.Comment: Accepted by NJ