UC Riverside

We study a mixture of ultracold spin-half fermionic and spin-one bosonic atoms in a shallow optical lattice where the bosons are coupled to the fermions via both density-density and spin-spin interactions. We consider the parameter regime where the bosons are in a superfluid ground state, integrate them out, and obtain an effective action for the fermions. We carry out a renormalization group analysis of this effective fermionic action at low temperatures, show that the presence of the spinor bosons may lead to a separation of Fermi surfaces of the spin-up and spin-down fermions, and investigate the parameter range where this phenomenon occurs. We also calculate the susceptibilities corresponding to the possible superfluid instabilities of the fermions and obtain their possible broken-symmetry ground states at low temperatures and weak interactions. © 2011 American Physical Society.