Phase Diagram of a Spin-Orbit Coupled Fermi Gases in a Bilayer Optical Lattice

Abstract

We investigate the stability of helical superfluid phase in a spin-orbit coupled Fermi gas loaded in a bilayer optical lattice. The phase diagram of the system is constructed in the mean field framework. We investigate the topological properties of the superfluid phases by a nontrivial application of the Fermi surface topological invariant to our time-reversal invariant system with degeneracies on the Fermi surface. We find that there is a first-order phase boundary in the phase diagram of half filling case and the superfluid phases are all topological trivial. The superfluid phase is topological nontrivial when the filling fraction deviates from the half filling. In the topological nontrivial superfluid phase, a full pairing gap exists in the bulk and gapless helical Majorana edge states exist at the boundary.