Three-component Ultracold Fermi Gases with Spin-Orbit Coupling

Abstract: We investigate the pairing physics in a three-component Fermi-Fermi mixture, where a few impurities are immersed in a non-interacting spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ Fermi gas with synthetic spin-orbit coupling (SOC), and interact attractively with one spin species in the Fermi gas. Due to the interplay of SOC and spin-selective interaction, the molecular state intrinsically acquires a non-zero center-of-mass momentum, which results in a new type of Fulde-Ferrell (FF) pairing in spin-orbit coupled Fermi systems. The existence of the Fermi sea can also lead to the competition between FF-like molecular states with different center-of-mass momenta, which corresponds to a first-order transition between FF phases in the thermodynamic limit. As the interaction strength is tuned, a polaron-molecule transition occurs in the highly imbalanced system, where the boundary varies non-monotonically with SOC parameters and gives rise to the reentrance of polaron states. The rich physics in this system can be probed using existing experimental techniques.