Solitons and vortices in ultracold fermionic gases

We investigate the possibilities for the generation of solitons and vortices in a degenerate gas of neutral fermionic atoms. In analogy with the already experimentally demonstrated technique applied to a gaseous Bose-Einstein condensate we propose the phase engineering of a Fermi gas as a practical route to excited states with solitons and vortices. We stress that solitons and vortices appear even in a non-interacting fermionic gas. For solitons, in a system with a sufficiently large number of fermions and appropriate trap configuration, the Pauli blocking acts as the interaction between particles.