Radial Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov state in a population-imbalanced Fermi gas

Abstract: The possibility of a Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) state in a population imbalanced Fermi gas with a vortex is proposed. Employing the Bogoliubov-de-Gennes formalism we self-consistently determine the superfluid order parameter and the particle number density in the presence of a vortex. We find that as increasing population imbalance, the superfluid order parameter spatially oscillates around the vortex core in the radial direction, indicating that the FFLO state becomes stable. We find that the radial FFLO states cover a wide region of the phase diagram in the weak-coupling regime at $T=0$ in contrast to the conventional case without a vortex. We show that this inhomogeneous superfluidity can be detected as peak structures of the local polarization rate associated with the node structure of the superfluid order parameter. Since the vortex in the 3D Fermi gas with population imbalance has been already realized in experiments, our proposal is a promising candidate of the FFLO state in cold atom physics.