Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov or Majorana superfluids: The fate of fermionic cold atoms in spin-orbit-coupled optical lattices

Abstract

The recent experimental realization of spin-orbit (SO) coupling for ultracold atoms opens a completely new avenue for exploring new quantum matters. In experiments, the SO coupling is implemented simultaneously with a Zeeman field. Such SO-coupled Fermi gases are predicted to support Majorana fermions with non-Abelian exchange statistics in one dimension (1D). However, as shown in recent theory and experiments for 1D spin-imbalanced Fermi gases, the Zeeman field can lead to the long-sought Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) superfluids with nonzero center-of-mass momentum Cooper pairings, in contrast to the zero center-of-mass momentum pairings in Majorana superfluids. Therefore a natural question to ask is which phase, FFLO or Majorana superfluids, will survive in SO-coupled Fermi gases in the presence of a large out-of-plane Zeeman field. In this paper, we address this question by studying the mean-field quantum phases of 1D (quasi-1D) SO-coupled fermionic cold-atom optical lattices.