Mass flows and angular momentum density for \(p_x + ip_y\) paired fermions in a harmonic trap (Q2467705)

In this paper the Bogoliubov-de Gennes (BdG) equation is used to obtain numerical results for the angular momentum and associated mass flows in a 2-D model of \(p_x + ip_y\) superfluid fermions confined in a harmonic trap. First, it is presented a brief review of the BdG formalism. To account for the effect of a condensate of Cooper pairs the second-quantized many-body Hamiltonian is replaced by the Bogoliubov Hamiltonian (BH). The magnitude and form of a non-zero gap-function matrix are taken in the paper as something imposed externally. Based on that the corresponding particle-number non-conserving BH is written. The two-by-two block-matrix form of the many-body Hamiltonian conveniently allows it to be diagonalized by using a Bogoliubov transformation. The single-particle BdG eigenvalue problem is solved and the corresponding BH is found. In the case of a fixed (even) number of particles \(N\) the resulting many-body wave-function is the Pfaffian, but in the large \(N\) limit there is not locally measurable distinction between the sharp-phase and the sharp-particle-number ground states. Then, the above considered one-particle Hamiltonian to being 2-D harmonic oscillator is considered into framework of a model, consisting of spinless fermions confined in a harmonic trap in the plane. By defining new ladder operators the angular momentum of the eigenstates and corresponding normalized real-space wave-functions are determined. As a result the integer number of the negative-energy eigenstates of the BH counts the height of the state in the column of eigenstates of angular momentum. Then, it is supposed that some suitable interaction has caused fermions to enter a supefluid phase characterized by an order parameter with \(p_x + ip_y\) symmetry. For the fluid to being a single atomic layer of \({}^3\)He-A, it is shown how symmetries and the harmonic oscillator selection rules serve to reduce the BdG equation to a tridiagonal matrix eigenvalue problem. Then, the spectrum and eigenvectors for a variety of gap parameter and a chemical potential, controlling the number of particles in the trap, are computed. In particular, to investigate whether the edge modes are the source of the entire harmonic trap edge current, it is isolated their contribution to the angular momentum density and mass-flow current. Finally, different results for the mass current in 3-D \({}^3\)He-A are discussed, and shown that at zero temperature and for constant director the results obtained for mass flow closely follow the Ishikawa-Mermin-Muzikar formula.