Regular Article

Low-energy modes of spin-imbalanced Fermi gases in BCS phase

¹ Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia, Università degli Studi di Firenze, and Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sezione di Firenze, Via G. Sansone 1, 50019 Sesto Fiorentino, Firenze, Italy
² Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sezione di Firenze, Via G. Sansone 1, 50019 Sesto Fiorentino, Firenze, Italy
³ Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences, Nibelungenplatz 1, 60318 Frankfurt am Main, Germany

^a e-mail: matera@fi.infn.it

Received: 6 March 2017
Received in final form: 31 May 2017
Published online: 16 November 2017

Abstract

The low-energy modes of a spin-imbalanced superfluid Fermi gas in the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) side are studied. The gas is assumed to be sufficiently dilute so that the pairing of atoms can be considered effective only in s-wave between fermions of different internal state. The order parameter at equilibrium is determined by the mean-field approximation, while the properties of the collective modes are calculated within a Gaussian approximation for the fluctuations of the order parameter. In particular we investigate the effects of asymmetry between the populations of the two different components and of temperature on the frequency and damping of collective modes. It is found that the temperature does not much affect the frequency and the damping of the modes, whereas an increase of the imbalance shifts the frequency toward lower values and enhances the damping sensitively. Besides the Bogoliubov-Anderson phonons, we observe modes at zero frequency for finite values of the wave-number. These modes indicate that an instability develops driving the system toward two separate phases, normal and superfluid.