Open Access

Bernhard Frank, Michele Pini, Johannes Lang, Francesco Piazza

• The electromagnetic field of standing-wave or ring cavities induces a spatially modulated, infinite-range interaction between atoms in an ultracold Fermi gas, with a single wavelength comparable to the Fermi length. This interaction has no analog in other systems of itinerant particles and has so far been studied only in the regime where it is attractive at zero distance. Here, we fully solve the problem of competing instabilities of the Fermi surface induced by single-wavelength interactions. We find that while the density-wave (superradiant) instability dominates on the attractive side, it is absent for repulsive interactions, where the competition is instead won by nonsuperradiant superfluid phases at low temperatures, with fermion pairs forming at both vanishing and finite center-of-mass momentum. Moreover, even in the absence of such symmetry-breaking instabilities, the Fermi surface exhibits a peculiar anisotropic deformation. We estimate this full phenomenology to be withinThe electromagnetic field of standing-wave or ring cavities induces a spatially modulated, infinite-range interaction between atoms in an ultracold Fermi gas, with a single wavelength comparable to the Fermi length. This interaction has no analog in other systems of itinerant particles and has so far been studied only in the regime where it is attractive at zero distance. Here, we fully solve the problem of competing instabilities of the Fermi surface induced by single-wavelength interactions. We find that while the density-wave (superradiant) instability dominates on the attractive side, it is absent for repulsive interactions, where the competition is instead won by nonsuperradiant superfluid phases at low temperatures, with fermion pairs forming at both vanishing and finite center-of-mass momentum. Moreover, even in the absence of such symmetry-breaking instabilities, the Fermi surface exhibits a peculiar anisotropic deformation. We estimate this full phenomenology to be within reach of dedicated state-of-the-art experimental setups.…