Superfluidity in a Three-flavor Fermi Gas with SU(3) Symmetry

TL;DR

This paper explores superfluidity in a three-flavor Fermi gas with SU(3) symmetry, revealing unique Nambu-Goldstone modes and their impact on thermodynamics.

Contribution

It provides a theoretical analysis of superfluidity and Nambu-Goldstone modes in a three-flavor Fermi gas with SU(3) symmetry, highlighting novel mode behavior.

Findings

Fermionic superfluid contains both gapped and gapless excitations.

Only three Nambu-Goldstone modes appear despite symmetry breaking.

Quadratic dispersion and mass gaps significantly affect low-temperature thermodynamics.

Abstract

We investigate the superfluidity and the associated Nambu-Goldstone modes in a three-flavor atomic Fermi gas with SU(3) global symmetry. The s-wave pairing occurs in flavor anti-triplet channel due to the Pauli principle, and the superfluid state contains both gapped and gapless fermionic excitations. Corresponding to the spontaneous breaking of the SU(3) symmetry to a SU(2) symmetry with five broken generators, there are only three Nambu-Goldstone modes, one is with linear dispersion law and two are with quadratic dispersion law. The other two expected Nambu-Goldstone modes become massive with a mass gap of the order of the fermion energy gap in a wide coupling range. The abnormal number of Nambu-Goldstone modes, the quadratic dispersion law and the mass gap have significant effect on the low temperature thermodynamics of the matter.