Title: Exotic Superfluidity in Spin-Orbit-Coupled Atomic Fermi gases and Bose-Einstein Condensates

Speaker:  Prof. Hui Hu (胡辉)

Swinburne University of Technology

Ultracold atoms - atoms at incredibly low temperatures that are only one billionth degree above absolute zero temperature - have been proven to be an ideal table-top system to reveal novel states of quantum matter. The latest development in ultracold atoms concerns the engineering of a synthetic non-Abelian gauge field in ⁸⁷Rb and ⁴⁰K atoms, which leads to the coupling between the spin and the orbital degrees of freedom of the atom.  

In this talk, I will introduce our recent work on spin-orbit-coupled ultracold atomic gases. For atomic Fermi gases, we predict a new anisotropic state of matter 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. For Bose-Einstein condensates, we show that the interplay between the SOC and the inter-atomic interaction leads to a very rich phase diagram, with each phase featuring a distinct spin-texture pattern and symmetry class.  The intricate spin texture can arise purely from the SOC even when the interaction is completely spin-independent.