Inhomogeneous superfluid phases in 6Li-40K mixtures at unitarity

Abstract

We show that the ultracold three-dimensional 6Li-40K mixture at unitarity can exhibit the highly exotic Larkin-Ovchinnikov superfluid phase. We determine the phase diagram for majorities of 40K atoms within mean-field theory taking the inhomogeneities of the fermion states into account exactly. We find two different inhomogeneous superfluid phases in mixtures with a majority of 40K atoms, namely the Larkin-Ovchinnikov (LO ) phase with one inhomogeneous direction and a cubic phase (LO3) where three spatial translational symmetries are broken. We determine the transition between these two phases by solving the Bogoliubov–de Gennes equations in the superfluid LO phase. Subsequently, we calculate the atomic density modulation of the atoms in the LO phase and show that it is sufficiently large to be visible in experiment.