Boundary-Obstructed Topological Superfluids in Staggered Spin-Orbit Coupled Fermi Gases.

We present an experimental feasible proposal for synthesizing second-order topological superfluids that support Majorana corner modes in spin-orbit coupled Fermi gases. For this purpose, we consider the staggered spin-orbit coupling introduced in one direction. This results in a system consisted of two sublattices, providing extra degree of freedom for the emergent higher-order topological state. We find the topological trivial superfluids, first-order topological superfluids and boundary-obstructed second-order topological superfluids, as well as different topological phase transitions among them with respect to the the experimental tunable parameters. At the weak interaction regime, the phase transition is characterized by the Chern number accompanied by the bulk gap closing and reopening. However, at the strong interaction regime, we find the system can support the boundary-obstructed topological superfluids with Majorana corner modes, but topological phase transition dose not undergo the gap-closing of bulk bands. Instead the transition is refined by the quadrupole moment and signaled out by the gap-closing of edge-state. The proposal is simply based on the $s$-wave interaction and readily feasible via existing experimental techniques, which suggests new possibilities in interacting spin-orbit coupled systems by unifying both first- and higher-order topological superfluids in a simple but realistic microscopic model.