Polaron in a p+ip Fermi topological superfluid

Fang Qin, Xiaoling Cui, Wei Yi
2019 Physical Review A  
We study polaron excitations induced by an impurity interacting with a two-dimensional p+ip Fermi superfluid. As the Fermi-Fermi pairing interaction is tuned, the background Fermi superfluid undergoes a topological phase transition. We show that such a transition is accompanied by a discontinuity in the second derivative of the polaron energy, regardless of the impurity-fermion interaction. We also identify a polaron to trimer crossover when the Fermi superfluid is in the strongly interacting,
more » ... hus topologically trivial, regime. However, the trimer state is metastable against the molecular state where the impurity binds a Bogoliubov quasiparticle from the Fermi superfluid. By comparing the polaron to molecule transition in our system with that of an impurity in a noninteracting Fermi sea, we find that pairing interactions in the background Fermi superfluid effectively facilitate the impurity-fermion binding. Our results suggest the possibility of using the impurity as a probe for detecting topological phase transitions in the background; they also reveal interesting competitions between various many-body states in the system.
doi:10.1103/physreva.99.033613 fatcat:66bzte7zunfl7f3ypbdbcson6q