Wavefunction Vortex Attachment via Matrix Products: Application to Atomic Fermi Gases in Flat Spin-Orbit Bands

TL;DR

This paper introduces a matrix product approach to incorporate vortices into wavefunctions, enabling validation of Jastrow-based states and revealing vortex behavior in atomic Fermi gases with spin-orbit coupling.

Contribution

A novel matrix product method for inserting vortices into variational wavefunctions, facilitating their validation and analysis in complex quantum systems.

Findings

Vortices cluster near the system center in atomic Fermi gases with flat Rashba bands.

Vortices are predicted to be observable in time-of-flight imaging experiments.

The approach broadens the validation of Jastrow-based wavefunctions in many-body physics.

Abstract

Variational wavefunctions that introduce zeros (vortices) to screen repulsive interactions are typically difficult to verify in unbiased microscopic calculations. An approach is constructed to insert vortices into ansatz wavefunctions using a matrix product representation. This approach opens the door to validation of a broad class of Jastrow-based wavefunctions. The formalism is applied to a model motivated by experiments on ultracold atomic gases in the presence of synthetic spin-orbit coupling. Validated wavefunctions show that vortices in atomic Fermi gases with flat Rashba spin-orbit bands cluster near the system center and should therefore be directly visible in time-of-flight imaging.