Effect of population imbalance on the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless phase transition in a superfluid Fermi gas

Abstract

The Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) mechanism describes the breakdown of superfluidity in a two-dimensional Bose gas or a two-dimensional gas of paired fermions. In the latter case, a population imbalance between the two pairing partners in the Fermi mixture is known to influence pairing characteristics. Here, we investigate the effects of imbalance on the two-dimensional BKT superfluid transition and show that superfluidity is even more sensitive to imbalance than for three-dimensional systems. Finite-temperature phase diagrams are derived using the functional integral formalism in combination with a hydrodynamic action functional for the phase fluctuations. This allows to identify a phase-separation region and tricritical points due to imbalance. In contrast to superfluidity in the three-dimensional case, the effect of imbalance is also pronounced in the strong-coupling regime.