Dark solitons in a superfluid Fermi gas

Mauro Antezza, Franco Dalfovo, Lev P. Pitaevskii, Sandro Stringari

Published 2007-06-05, updated 2007-10-12Version 2

We investigate the behavior of dark solitons in a superfluid Fermi gas along the BCS-BEC crossover by solving the Bogoliubov - de Gennes equations and looking for real and odd solutions for the order parameter. We show that in the resonance unitary region, where the scattering length is large, the density profile of the soliton has a deep minimum, differently from what happens in the BCS regime. The superfluid gap is found to be significantly quenched by the presence of the soliton due to the occurrence of Andreev fermionic bound states localized near the nodal plane of the order parameter.