Cooper pair polaritons in cold fermionic atoms within a cavity

Amaury Dodel; Alexander Pikovski; Igor Ermakov; Marek Narozniak; Valentin Ivannikov; Haibin Wu; Tim Byrnes

doi:10.1103/PhysRevResearch.2.013184

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Cooper pair polaritons in cold fermionic atoms within a cavity

Amaury Dodel, Alexander Pikovski, Igor Ermakov, Marek Narozniak, Valentin Ivannikov, Haibin Wu, Tim Byrnes

DOI 10.1103/PhysRevResearch.2.013184 · Physical Review Research

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Abstract

We formulate a Bardeen-Cooper-Schriffer (BCS) theory of quasiparticles in a degenerate Fermi gas strongly coupled to photons in a optical cavity. The elementary photonic excitations of the system are cavity polaritons, which consist of a cavity photon and an excitation of an atom within the Fermi sea. The excitation of the atom out of the Fermi sea leaves behind a hole, which together results in a loosely bound Cooper pair, allowing for the system to be written by a BCS wave function. As the density of the excitations is increased, the excited atom and hole become more strongly bound, crossing over into the molecular regime. This thus realizes an alternative BCS to BEC crossover scenario, where the participating species are quasiparticle excitations in a Fermi sea consisting of excited atoms and holes.