Spin-Orbit Coupling Induced Coherent Production of Feshbach Molecules in a Degenerate Fermi Gas

Abstract

In this work we demonstrate a dynamic process in which SO coupling can coherently produce s-wave Feshbach molecules from a fully polarized Fermi gas, and can induce a coherent oscillation between Feshbach molecules and spin polarized gas. For comparison, we also show that such phenomena are absent if the inter-component coupling is momentum-independent. This demonstrates experimentally that SO coupling does provide finite matrix element between a singlet state and a triplet state, and therefore, implies the bound pairs of a system with SO coupling have triplet p-wave component, which can become topological superfluid by further cooling these pairs to condensation and confining them to lower dimension.