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Multiply Quantized Vortices in Fermionic Superfluids: Angular Momentum, Unpaired Fermions, and Spectral Asymmetry
Abhinav Prem1, Sergej Moroz2,3, Victor Gurarie1
1Department of Physics and Center for Theory of Quantum Matter, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309, USA.
Abstract:
We compute the orbital angular momentum L_{z} of an s-wave paired superfluid in the presence of an axisymmetric multiply quantized vortex. For vortices with a winding number |k|>1, we find that in the weak-pairing BCS regime, L_{z} is significantly reduced from its value ℏNk/2 in the Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) regime, where N is the total number of fermions. This deviation results from the presence of unpaired fermions in the BCS ground state, which arise as a consequence of spectral flow along the vortex subgap states. We support our results analytically and numerically by solving the Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations within the weak-pairing BCS regime.
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