Collective modes and superflow instabilities of strongly correlated Fermi superfluids

Abstract

We study the superfluid phase of the one-band attractive Hubbard model of fermions as a prototype of a strongly correlated s-wave fermion superfluid on a lattice. We show that the collective mode spectrum of this superfluid exhibits, in addition to the long wavelength sound mode, a sharp roton mode over a wide range of densities and interaction strengths. We compute the sound velocity and the roton gap within a generalized random phase approximation (GRPA) and show that the GRPA results are in good agreement, at strong coupling, with a spin wave analysis of the appropriate strong-coupling pseudospin model. We also investigate, using this two-pronged approach, the breakdown of superfluidity in the presence of a supercurrent. We find that the superflow can break down at a critical flow momentum via several distinct mechanisms - depairing, Landau instabilities or dynamical instabilities - depending on the dimensionality, the interaction strength and the fermion density. The most interesting of these instabilities is a charge modulation dynamical instability which is distinct from previously studied dynamical instabilities of Bose superfluids. The charge order associated with this instability can be of two types: (i) a commensurate checkerboard modulation driven by softening of the roton mode at the Brillouin zone corner, or, (ii) an incommensurate density modulation arising from superflow-induced finite momentum pairing of Bogoliubov quasiparticles. We elucidate the dynamical phase diagram showing the critical flow momentum of the leading instability over a wide range of fermion densities and interaction strengths and point out implications of our results for experiments on cold atom fermion superfluids in an optical lattice.