CAOUS researchers predict novel superfluidity in ultracold atomic Fermi gases

Ultracold atoms have been proven to be an ideal table-top system to reveal novel state of matter. The latest development in ultracold atoms concerns the engineering of a synthetic non-Abelian gauge field [Nature 471, 83 (2011)], which leads to the coupling between spin and orbit degrees of freedom.

Researchers at Swinburne's Centre for Atom-Optics and Ultrafast Spectroscopy have recently predicted a new anisotropic state of matter in spin-orbit coupled ultracold atomic Fermi gases, which consists of exotic quasi-particles with anisotropic effective mass. In the superfluid phase, these exotic quasi-particles exhibit salient features in the momentum distribution, single-particle spectral function and spin structure factor, easily detectable in current experiments. The work has been published in Physical Review Letters.

Link to paper: Hui Hu, Lei Jiang, Xia-Ji Liu, and Han Pu, Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 195304 (2011)