Competing pairing states for ultracold fermions in optical lattices with an artificial staggered magnetic field

Abstract

We study fermionic superfluidity in an ultracold Bose-Fermi mixture loaded into a square optical lattice subjected to a staggered flux. While the bosons form a Bose-Einstein condensate at very low temperature and weak interaction, the interacting fermions experience an additional long-ranged attractive interaction mediated by phonons in the bosonic condensate. This leads us to consider a generalized Hubbard model with on-site and nearest-neighbor attractive interactions, which give rise to two competing pairing channels. We use the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer theory to determine the regimes where distinct fermionic superfluids are stabilized and find that the nonlocal pairing channel favors a superfluid state which breaks both the gauge and the lattice symmetries, similar to unconventional superconductivity occurring in some strongly correlated systems. Furthermore, the particular structure of the single-particle spectrum leads to unexpected consequences, for example, a dome-shaped superfluid region in the temperature versus filing fraction phase diagram, with a normal phase that contains much richer physics than a Fermi liquid. Notably, the relevant temperature regime and coupling strength are readily accessible in state of the art experiments with ultracold trapped atoms.