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BCS-BEC Crossover in 2D Fermi Gases with Rashba Spin-Orbit Coupling

We present a systematic theoretical study of the BCS-BEC crossover in two-dimensional Fermi gases with Rashba spin-orbit coupling (SOC). By solving the exact two-body problem in the presence of an attractive short-range interaction we show that the SOC enhances the formation of the bound state: the binding energy $E_{\text B}$ and effective mass $m_{\text B}$ of the bound state grows along with the increase of the SOC. For the many-body problem, even at weak attraction, a dilute Fermi gas can evolve from a BCS superfluid state to a Bose condensation of molecules when the SOC becomes comparable to the Fermi momentum. The ground-state properties and the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) transition temperature are studied, and analytical results are obtained in various limits. For large SOC, the BKT transition temperature recovers that for a Bose gas with an effective mass $m_{\text B}$. We find that the condensate and superfluid densities have distinct behaviors in the presence of SOC: the condensate density is generally enhanced by the SOC due to the increase of the molecule binding, the superfluid density is suppressed because of the non-trivial molecule effective mass $m_{\text B}$.