Inhomogeneous Superfluid Phases in the Unitary Li6-K40 Mixture

TL;DR

This paper predicts and characterizes inhomogeneous superfluid phases, including the LO and cubic phases, in a unitary Li-6/K-40 mixture, providing phase diagrams and experimental signatures.

Contribution

It introduces the existence of LO and cubic superfluid phases in the Li-6/K-40 mixture at unitarity and maps their phase diagram considering inhomogeneities.

Findings

Identification of LO and cubic superfluid phases.

Phase diagram for majority K atoms.

Predicted observable density modulations.

Abstract

We show that the ultracold three-dimensional ${}^6$Li-${}^{40}$K mixture at unitarity can exhibit the highly exotic Larkin-Ovchinnikov superfluid phase. We determine the phase diagram for majorities of ${}^{40}$K atoms within mean-field theory taking the inhomogeneities of the fermion states into account exactly. We find two different inhomogeneous superfluid phases in mixtures with a majority of ${}^{40}$K atoms, namely the Larkin-Ovchinnikov (LO) phase with one inhomogeneous direction and a cubic phase (LO$^3$) where three spatial translational symmetries are broken. We determine the transition between these two phases by solving the Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations in the superfluid LO phase. Subsequently, we calculate the atomic density modulation of the atoms in the LO phase and show that it is sufficiently large to be visible in experiment.