BCS-BEC crossover in spin-orbit-coupled two-dimensional Fermi gases

The recent experimental realization of spin-orbit coupling for ultracold atoms has generated much interest in the physics of spin-orbit-coupled degenerate Fermi gases. Although recently the BCS-BEC crossover in three-dimensional (3D) spin-orbit-coupled Fermi gases has been intensively studied, the corresponding two-dimensional (2D) crossover physics has remained unexplored. In this paper, we investigate, both numerically and analytically, the BCS-BEC crossover physics in 2D degenerate Fermi gases in the presence of the Rashba type of spin-orbit coupling. We derive the mean-field gap and atom-number equations suitable for 2D spin-orbit-coupled Fermi gases and solve them numerically and self-consistently, from which the dependence of the ground-state properties (chemical potential, superfluid pairing gap, ground-state energy per atom) on the system parameters (e.g., binding energy, spin-orbit-coupling strength) is obtained. Furthermore, we derive analytical expressions for these ground-state quantities, which agree well with our numerical results within a broad parameter region. Such analytical expressions also agree qualitatively with previous numerical results for 3D spin-orbit-coupled Fermi gases, where analytical results are lacking. We show that, with increasing spin-orbit coupling (SOC) strength, the chemical potential is shifted by a constant determined by the SOC strength. The superfluid pairing gap is enhanced significantly in the BCS limit for strong SOC, but increases only slightly in the BEC limit.