Superfluidity in a Three-flavor Fermi Gas with SU(3) Symmetry

Abstract

We investigate the superfluidity and the associated Nambu-Goldstone modes in a three-flavor atomic Fermi gas with SU(3) global symmetry. The s-wave pairing occurs in flavor anti-triplet channel due to the Pauli principle, and the superfluid state contains both gapped and gapless fermionic excitations. Corresponding to the spontaneous breaking of the SU(3) symmetry to a SU(2) symmetry with five broken generators, there are only three Nambu-Goldstone modes, one is with linear dispersion law and two are with quadratic dispersion law. The other two expected Nambu-Goldstone modes become massive with a mass gap of the order of the fermion energy gap in a wide coupling range. The abnormal number of Nambu-Goldstone modes, the quadratic dispersion law and the mass gap have significant effect on the low temperature thermodynamics of the matter.