Effective control of chemical potentials by Rabi coupling with rf-fields in ultracold mixtures

Abstract: We show that a linear term coupling the atoms of an ultracold binary mixture provides a simple method to induce an effective and tunable population imbalance between them. This term is easily realized by a Rabi coupling between different hyperfine levels of the same atomic species. The resulting effective imbalance holds for one-particle states dressed by the Rabi coupling and obtained diagonalizing the mixing matrix of the Rabi term. This way of controlling the chemical potentials applies for both bosonic and fermionic atoms and it allows also for spatially and temporally dependent imbalances. As a first application, we show that, in the case of two attractive fermionic hyperfine levels with equal chemical potentials and coupled by the Rabi pulse, the same superfluid properties of an imbalanced binary mixture are recovered. We finally discuss the properties of m-species mixtures in the presence of SU(m)-invariant interactions.