Proposed Fermi-surface reservoir engineering and application to realizing unconventional Fermi superfluids in a driven-dissipative nonequilibrium Fermi gas

Abstract

We develop a theory to describe the dynamics of a driven-dissipative many-body Fermi system, to pursue our proposal to realize exotic quantum states based on reservoir engineering. Our idea is to design the shape of a Fermi surface so as to have multiple Fermi edges, by properly attaching multiple reservoirs with different chemical potentials to a fermionic system. These emerged edges give rise to additional scattering channels that can destabilize the system into unconventional states, which is exemplified in this work by considering a driven-dissipative attractively interacting Fermi gas. By formulating a quantum kinetic equation using the Nambu-Keldysh Green's function technique, we explore nonequilibrium steady states in this system and assess their stability. We find that, in addition to the BCS-type isotropic pairing state, a Fulde-Ferrell-type anisotropic superfluid state being accompanied by Cooper pairs with non-zero center-of-mass momentum exists as a stable solution, even in the absence of a magnetic Zeeman field. Our result implies a great potential of realizing quantum matter beyond the equilibrium paradigm, by engineering the shape and topology of Fermi surfaces in both electronic and atomic systems.