Polarized Fermi gases in asymmetric optical lattices

The zero-temperature phase diagrams of imbalanced two-species Fermi gases are investigated in asymmetric optical lattices with arbitrary potential depths, based on the exact spectrum instead of the Fermi-Hubbard model. We study the effect of lattice potentials and atomic densities to the fully paired Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) state and particularly the Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) state. It is found that the increasing lattice potential favors BCS at low densities because of the enhanced effective coupling, whereas FFLO is favored at intermediate densities when the system undergoes a dimensional crossover. Finally, using the local density approximation, we study the evolution of the phase profile in the presence of external harmonic traps by merely tuning the lattice potentials.