Wavefunction Vortex Attachment via Matrix Products: Application to Atomic Fermi Gases in Flat Spin-Orbit Bands

Variational wavefunctions that introduce zeros (vortices) to screen repulsive interactions are typically difficult to verify in unbiased microscopic calculations. An approach is constructed to insert vortices into ansatz wavefunctions using a matrix product representation. This approach opens the door to validation of a broad class of Jastrow-based wavefunctions. The formalism is applied to a model motivated by experiments on ultracold atomic gases in the presence of synthetic spin-orbit coupling. Validated wavefunctions show that vortices in atomic Fermi gases with flat Rashba spin-orbit bands cluster near the system center and should therefore be directly visible in time-of-flight imaging.