Communal pairing in spin-imbalanced Fermi gases

Abstract

A spin-imbalanced Fermi gas with an attractive contact interaction forms a superconducting state whose underlying components are superpositions of Cooper pairs that share minority-spin fermions. This superconducting state includes correlations between all available fermions, making it energetically favorable to the Fulde--Ferrell--Larkin--Ovchinnikov superconducting state. The ratio of the number of up- and down-spin fermions in the instability is set by the ratio of the up- and down-spin density of states in momentum at the Fermi surfaces, to fully utilize the accessible fermions. We present analytical and complementary Diffusion Monte Carlo results for the state.