Solitons and vortices in ultracold fermionic gases

Abstract

We investigate the possibilities of generation of solitons and vortices in a degenerate gas of neutral fermionic atoms. In analogy with, already experimentally demonstrated, technique applied to gaseous Bose-Einstein condensate we propose the phase engineering of a Fermi gas as a practical route to excited states with solitons and vortices. We stress that solitons and vortices appear even in a noninteracting fermionic gas. For solitons, in a system with sufficiently large number of fermions and appropriate trap configuration, the Pauli blocking acts as the interaction between particles.