Vortex line in spin-orbit coupled atomic Fermi gases

Abstract

It has recently been shown that the spin-orbit coupling gives rise to topologically nontrivial and thermodynamically stable gapless superfluid phases when the pseudospin populations of an atomic Fermi gas are imbalanced, with the possibility of featuring Majorana zero-energy quasiparticles. In this paper, we consider a Rashba-type spin-orbit coupling, and use the Bogoliubov-de Gennes formalism to analyze a single vortex line along a finite cylinder with a periodic boundary condition. We show that the signatures for the appearance of core- and edge-bound states can be directly found in the density of single-particle states and particle-current density. In particular, we find that the pseudospin components counterflow near the edge of the cylinder, the strength of which increases with increasing spin-orbit coupling.