Pi-Josephson Junction and Spontaneous Superflow in Rings from Ultracold Fermionic Atomic Gases

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the theoretical possibility of creating a $$-Josephson junction in ultracold fermionic gases, leading to spontaneous superflow in rings and potential applications in hypertronics.

Contribution

It introduces a model for $$-Josephson junctions in ultracold fermionic gases with mismatched chemical potentials, revealing spontaneous superflow and symmetry breaking.

Findings

A $$-Josephson junction can be realized in ultracold fermionic gases.

Spontaneous superflow occurs in rings with the $$-junction, breaking time-reversal symmetry.

Effects persist even with large mismatch $ \u2208 $, with reduced weak link thickness.

Abstract

he BCS-like pairing in ultracold fermionic atomic ($UCFAG$) gases is studied in the model of "isotopic-spin" pairing proposed in 1991 \cite% {Ku-Hof-SSC}. This model assumes a mismatch ($\delta $) in chemical potentials of pairing fermionic atoms. It is shown that a $\pi $-Josephson junction can be realized in $UCFAG$ systems, where the left and right banks $% S$ are the $UCFAG$ superfluids. The weak link $M$ consists from the normal $% UCFAG$ with the finite mismatch $\delta $. If the $\pi $-junction is a part of a closed ring the superfluid mass-current flows spontaneously in the ring, i.e., the time-reversal symmetry is broken spontaneously. This is realized if the radius of the ring $R$ is larger than the critical one $% R_{c} $. All these effects exist also in the case when $\delta \gg \Delta $, where $\Delta $ is the superfluid gap, but with the reduced thickness of the weak link. It is also discussed, that if junctions $SM_{1}M_{2}S$ and trilayers $% M_{1}SM_{2}$ from $UCFAG$ are realizable this renders a possibility for a novel electronics - \textit{hypertronics}.