Stability conditions and phase diagrams for two-component Fermi gases with population imbalance

Superfluidity in atomic Fermi gases with population imbalance has recently become an exciting research focus. There is considerable disagreement in the literature about the appropriate stability conditions for states in the phase diagram throughout the BCS to Bose-Einstein condensation crossover. Here we discuss these stability conditions for homogeneous polarized superfluid phases, and compare with recent alternative proposals. The requirement of a positive second-order partial derivative of the thermodynamic potential with respect to the fermionic excitation gap Delta (at fixed chemical potentials) is demonstrated to be equivalent to the positive definiteness of the particle number susceptibility matrix. In addition, we show the positivity of the effective pair mass constitutes another nontrivial stability condition. These conditions determine the (local) stability of the system towards phase separation (or other ordered phases). We also study systematically the effects of finite temperature and the related pseudogap on the phase diagrams defined by our stability conditions.