Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer-type pairing in a spin-1/2 Bose gas with spin-orbit coupling

Abstract

We apply the functional path-integral approach to analyze how the presence of a spin-orbit coupling (SOC) affects the basic properties of a BCS-type paired state in a two-component Bose gas. In addition to a mean-field theory that is based on the saddle-point approximation for the intercomponent pairing, we derive a Ginzburg-Landau theory by including the Gaussian fluctuations on top, and use them to reveal the crucial roles played by the momentum-space structure of an arbitrary SOC field in the stability of the paired state at finite temperatures. For this purpose, we calculate the critical transition temperature for the formation of paired bosons, and that of the gapless quasiparticle excitations for a broad range of interaction and SOC strengths. In support of our results for the many-body problem, we also benchmark our numerical calculations against the analytically tractable limits, and provide a full account of the two-body limit including its nonvanishing binding energy for arbitrarily weak interactions and the anisotropic effective mass tensor.