The notion of a polaron, originally introduced in the context of electrons in ionic lattices, helps us to understand how a quantum impurity behaves when being immersed in and interacting with a many-body background. We discuss the impact of the impurities on the medium particles by considering feedback effects from polarons that can be realized in ultracold quantum gas experiments. In particular, we exemplify the modifications of the medium in the presence of either Fermi or Bose polarons. Regarding Fermi polarons we present a corresponding many-body diagrammatic approach operating at finite temperatures and discuss how mediated two- and three-body interactions are implemented within this framework. Utilizing this approach, we analyze the behavior of the spectral function of Fermi polarons at finite temperature by varying impurity-medium interactions as well as spatial dimensions from three to one. Interestingly, we reveal that the spectral function of the medium atoms could be a useful quantity for analyzing the transition/crossover from attractive polarons to molecules in three-dimensions. As for the Bose polaron, we showcase the depletion of the background Bose-Einstein condensate in the vicinity of the impurity atom. Such spatial modulations would be important for future investigations regarding the quantification of interpolaron correlations in Bose polaron problems.
We study a new type of Fermi polaron induced by an impurity interacting with an ultracold Fermi superfluid. Due to the three-component nature of the system, the polaron can become trimer-like with a non-universal energy spectrum. We identify multiple avoided crossings between impurity- and trimer-like solutions in both the attractive and the repulsive polaron spectra. In particular, the widths of avoided crossings gradually increase as the Fermi superfluid undergoes a crossover from the BCS side towards the BEC side, which suggests instabilities towards three-body losses. Such losses can be re…
A toolbox for the quantum simulation of polarons in ultracold atoms is presented. Motivated by the impressive experimental advances in the area of ultracold atomic mixtures, we theoretically study the problem of ultracold atomic impurities immersed in a Bose-Einstein condensate mixture (BEC). The coupling between impurity and BEC gives rise to the formation of polarons whose mutual interaction can be effectively tuned using an external laser driving a quasi-resonant Raman transition between the BEC components. Our scheme allows one to change the effective interactions between polarons in diffe…
An impurity atom immersed in an ultracold atomic Fermi gas can form a quasiparticle, so-called Fermi polaron, due to impurity-fermion interaction. We consider a three-dimensional homogeneous dipolar Fermi gas as a medium, where the interatomic dipole-dipole interaction (DDI) makes the Fermi surface deformed into a spheroidal shape, and, using a Chevy-type variational method, investigate the ground-state properties of the Fermi polaron: the effective mass, the momentum distribution of a particle-hole (p-h) excitation, the drag parameter, and the medium density modification around the impurity. …
Polaron quasiparticles are formed when a mobile impurity is coupled to the elementary excitations of a many-particle background. In the field of ultracold atoms, the study of the associated impurity problem has attracted a growing interest over the last fifteen years. Polaron quasiparticle properties are essential to our understanding of a variety of paradigmatic quantum many-body systems realized in ultracold atomic gases and in the solid state, from imbalanced Bose-Fermi and Fermi-Fermi mixtures to fermionic Hubbard models. In this topical review, we focus on the so-called repulsive polaron …
We employ radio-frequency spectroscopy to investigate a polarized spin-mixture of ultracold ${}^6$Li atoms close to a broad Feshbach scattering resonance. Focusing on the regime of strong repulsive interactions, we observe well-defined coherent quasiparticles even for unitarity-limited interactions. We characterize the many-body system by extracting the key properties of repulsive Fermi polarons: the energy $E_+$, the effective mass $m^*$, the residue $Z$ and the decay rate $Γ$. Above a critical interaction, $E_+$ is found to exceed the Fermi energy of the bath while $m^*$ diverges and even tu…
We analyze the dynamics of Bose polarons in the vicinity of a Feshbach resonance between the impurity and host atoms. We compute the radio-frequency absorption spectra for the case when the initial state of the impurity is non-interacting and the final state is strongly interacting. We compare results of different theoretical approaches including a single excitation expansion, a self-consistent T-matrix method, and a time-dependent coherent state approach. Our analysis reveals sharp spectral features arising from metastable states with several Bogoliubov excitations bound to the impurity atom.…
Mobile impurity atoms immersed in Bose-Einstein condensates provide a new platform for exploring Bose polarons. Recent experimental advances in the field of ultracold atoms make it possible to realize such systems with highly tunable microscopic parameters and to explore equilibrium and dynamical properties of polarons using a rich toolbox of atomic physics. In this paper we present a detailed theoretical analysis of Bose polarons in one dimensional systems of ultracold atoms. By combining a non-perturbative renormalization group approach with numerically exact diffusion Monte Carlo calculatio…
We explore repulsive Fermi polarons in one-dimensional harmonically trapped few-body mixtures of ultracold atoms using as a case example a $^6$Li-$^{40}$K mixture. A characterization of these quasiparticle-like states, whose appearance is signalled in the impurity's radiofrequency spectrum, is achieved by extracting their lifetime and residua. Increasing the number of $^{40}$K impurities leads to the occurrence of both single and multiple polarons that are entangled with their environment. An interaction-dependent broadening of the spectral lines is observed suggesting the presence of induced …
We investigate the system of a heavy impurity embedded in a paired two-component Fermi gas at the crossover from a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) to a Bardeen--Cooper--Schrieffer (BCS) superfluid via an extension of the functional determinant approach (FDA). FDA is an exact numerical approach applied to study manifestations of Anderson\textquoteright s orthogonality catastrophe (OC) in the system of a static impurity immersed in an ideal Fermi gas. Here, we extend the FDA to a strongly correlated superfluid background described by a BCS mean-field wavefunction. In contrast to the ideal Fermi g…
We study the spectrum of an impurity coupled to a Fermi sea (e.g., minority atom in an ultracold gas, exciton in a solid) by attraction strong enough to form a molecule/trion. We introduce a diagrammatic scheme which allows treating a finite mass impurity while reproducing the Fermi edge singularity in the immobile limit. For large binding energies the spectrum is characterized by a semi-coherent repulsive polaron and an incoherent molecule-hole continuum, which is the lowest-energy feature in the single-particle spectrum. The previously predicted attractive polaron seems not to exist for stro…
Recent experimental breakthroughs in non-Hermitian ultracold atomic lattices have dangled tantalizing prospects in realizing exotic, hitherto unreported, many-body non-Hermitian quantum phenomena. In this work, we discover and propose an experimental platform for a radically different non-Hermitian phenomenon dubbed polaron squeezing. It is marked by a dipole-like accumulation of fermions arising from an interacting impurity in a background of non-Hermitian reciprocity-breaking hoppings. We computed their spatial density and found that, unlike Hermitian polarons which are symmetrically localiz…
The physics of quantum impurities coupled to a many-body environment is among the most important paradigms of condensed matter physics. In particular, the formation of polarons, quasiparticles dressed by the polarization cloud, is key to the understanding of transport, optical response, and induced interactions in a variety of materials. Despite recent remarkable developments in ultracold atoms and solid-state materials, the direct measurement of their ultimate building block, the polaron cloud, has remained a fundamental challenge. We propose and anlalyze a unique platform to probe time-resol…
An extremely polarized mixture of an ultracold Fermi gas is expected to reduce to a Fermi polaron system, which consists of a single impurity immersed in the Fermi sea of majority atoms. By developing a many-body T -matrix theory, we investigate spectral properties of the polarized mixture in experimentally relevant regimes in which the system of finite impurity concentration at nonzero temperature is concerned. We explicitly demonstrate presence of polaron physics in the polarized limit and discuss effects of many polarons in an intermediate regime in a self-consistent manner. By analyzing th…
A Composite Fermion Approach to the Ultracold Dilute Fermi Gas
认为最近在强相互作用的超冷费米气体中观察到的费米液体与一个投影的费米气体有着密切的联系。这个结论是通过构造一组Jastrow波函数得出的,遵循Tan对物理希尔伯特空间结构的观察[Annals of Physics 323,2952(2008)]。杰斯特罗投影只是在BCS和费米气体波函数上实现了贝特-佩尔斯条件。这个过程提供了一个简单的图片出现的费米极化子作为复合费米子在正常状态下的高度极化的气体。它还表明,投影BCS波函数可以写为一个凝聚的复合费米子(或费米极化子)对。导出了复合费米子的哈密顿量。在平均场理论中,它表明,该哈密顿量的基态和激发是那些非相互作用的费米气体,虽然他们描述的Jastrow-Slater波函数。
Complex-valued in-medium potential between heavy impurities in ultracold atoms
Osaka University(大阪大学);The University of Electro-Communications(电气通信大学);Tohoku University(东北大学);Universität Heidelberg(海德堡大学);The University of Tokyo(东京大学);Niigata University(新潟大学);RIKEN iTHEMS, RIKEN(理化学研究所 iTHEMS 中心)
In ultracold atomic gases, a unique interplay arises between phenomena known from condensed matter physics, few-body physics and chemistry. Similar to an electron in a solid, an impurity in an ultracold gas can get dressed by excitations from the medium, forming a quasiparticle called the polaron. We study how dressing of an impurity leads to a modification of its chemical reactivity. Using a Gaussian state variational method in the frame of the impurity, we demonstrate that three-body correlations lead to an instability of the polaron. This instability is connected to an Efimov resonance, but…
We propose a new protocol to examine many-polaron properties in a cold atom experiment. Initially, polaronic clouds are prepared around the opposite edges of a majority gas cloud. After time evolution, the collision of two clouds exhibits various polaronic effects. To see how {\it collective} properties of many polarons with mediated interactions appear in the case in which the impurity and majority gases are composed of mass-balanced fermions with different spin components, we perform a nonlinear hydrodynamic simulation for collisional dynamics of two Fermi polaronic clouds. We found that the…
We revisit the polaron-molecule transition in three-dimensional(3D) fermion systems using the well-established variational approach. The molecule is found to be intrinsically unstable against lowest-order particle-hole excitations, and it can only approximate the ground state of impurity system with finite total momentum in the strong coupling regime. The polaron-molecule transition can therefore be reinterpreted as a first-order transition between single impurity systems with different total momenta. Within certain interaction window near their transition, both states appear as local minima i…
We consider the prospects for quantum simulation of condensed matter models exhibiting strong electron-phonon coupling using a hybrid platform of trapped laser-cooled ions interacting with an ultracold atomic gas. This system naturally posesses a phonon structure, in contrast to the standard optical lattice scenarios usually employed with ultracold atoms in which the lattice is generated by laser light and thus it remains static. We derive the effective Hamiltonian describing the general system and discuss the arising energy scales, relating the results to commonly employed extended Hubbard-Ho…
Quantum Monte Carlo techniques are employed to study the properties of polarons in an ultracold Fermi gas, at $T= 0,$ and in the unitary regime using both a zero-range model and a square-well potential. For a fixed density, the potential range is varied and results are extrapolated and compared against a zero-range model. A discussion regarding the choice of an interacting potential with a finite range is presented. We compute the polaron effective mass, the polaron binding energy, and the effective coupling between them. The latter is obtained using the Landau-Pomeranchuk's weakly interacting…
We study the properties of a spin-down neutron impurity immersed in a low-density free Fermi gas of spin-up neutrons. In particular, we analyze its energy ($E_\downarrow$), effective mass ($m^*_\downarrow$) and quasiparticle residue ($Z_\downarrow$). Results are compared with those of state-of-the-art quantum Monte Carlo calculations of the attractive Fermi polaron realized in ultracold atomic gases experiments, and with those of previous studies of the neutron polaron. Calculations are performed within the Brueckner--Hartree--Fock approach using the chiral two-body nucleon-nucleon interaction…
The Fröhlich polaron model describes a ubiquitous class of problems concerned with understanding properties of a single mobile particle interacting with a bosonic reservoir. Originally introduced in the context of electrons interacting with phonons in crystals, this model found applications in such diverse areas as strongly correlated electron systems, quantum information, and high energy physics. In the last few years this model has been applied to describe impurity atoms immersed in Bose-Einstein condensates of ultracold atoms. The tunability of microscopic parameters in ensembles of ultraco…
This study develops a novel experimental method of deducing the profile of interaction induced between impurities in a trapped gas of ultracold Fermi/Bose atoms, which are often referred to as Fermi/Bose polarons. In this method, we consider a two-body Fermi/Bose polaron collision experiment in which impurities and atoms interact only weakly. Numerical simulations of the quantum dynamics reveal the possibility to obtain information regarding the non-local induced interaction between two polarons from a measured profile of the polaron wave packet at several snapshots. This is because the potent…
We propose a class of variational Gaussian wavefunctions to describe Fröhlich polarons at finite momenta. Our wavefunctions give polaron energies that are in excellent agreement with the existing Monte Carlo results for a broad range of interactions. We calculate the effective mass of polarons and find smooth crossover between weak and intermediate impurity-bosons coupling. Effective masses that we obtain are considerably larger than those predicted by the mean-field method. A novel prediction based on our variational wavefunctions is a special pattern of correlations between host atoms that c…
When an impurity is immersed in a Bose-Einstein condensate, impurity-boson interactions are expected to dress the impurity into a quasiparticle, the Bose polaron. We superimpose an ultracold atomic gas of $^{87}$Rb with a much lower density gas of fermionic $^{40}$K impurities. Through the use of a Feshbach resonance and RF spectroscopy, we characterize the energy, spectral width and lifetime of the resultant polaron on both the attractive and the repulsive branches in the strongly interacting regime. The width of the polaron in the attractive branch is narrow compared to its binding energy, e…
Universität Heidelberg(海德堡大学);University of Warsaw(华沙大学);National University of Singapore(新加坡国立大学);Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik(马克斯·普朗克量子光学研究所)
Recently it has been proposed that three-component Fermi gases may exhibit a new type of crossover physics in which an unpaired Fermi sea of atoms smoothly evolves into that of trimers in addition to the ordinary BCS-BEC crossover of condensed pairs. Here we study its corresponding polaron problem in which a single impurity atom of one component interacts with condensed pairs of the other two components with equal populations. By developing a variational approach in the vicinity of a narrow Feshbach resonance, we show that the impurity atom smoothly changes its character from atom to trimer wi…
The Fröhlich model describes the interaction of a mobile impurity with a surrounding bath of phonons which leads to the formation of a quasiparticle, the polaron. In this article an efficient renormalization group approach is presented which provides a description of Fröhlich polarons in all regimes ranging from weak- to strong coupling. We apply the method to the Bose polaron problem of an ultracold impurity atom interacting with a background gas that is Bose-condensed. The extended renormalization group approach introduced here is capable to predict ground state properties for arbitrarily sm…
We apply the diagrammatic Monte Carlo approach to three-dimensional Fermi-polaron systems with mass-imbalance, where an impurity interacts resonantly with a noninteracting Fermi sea whose atoms have a different mass. This method allows to go beyond frequently used variational techniques by stochastically summing all relevant impurity Feynman diagrams up to a maximum expansion order limited by the sign problem. Polaron energy and quasiparticle residue can be accurately determined over a broad range of impurity masses. Furthermore, the spectral function of an imbalanced polaron demonstrates the …
In this work we study the formation and dynamics of polarons in a system with a few impurities in a lattice immersed in a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). This system has been experimentally realized using ultracold atoms and optical lattices. Here we consider a two-band model for the impurity atoms, along with a Bogoliubov approximation for the BEC, with phonons coupled to impurities via both intra- and inter-band transitions. We decouple this Fröhlich-like term by an extended two-band Lang-Firsov polaron transformation using a variational method. The new effective Hamiltonian with two (polaro…
We develop a non-Hermitian effective theory for a repulsively interacting Fermi gas in the excited branch. The on-shell $T$-matrix is employed as a complex-valued interaction term, which describes a repulsive interaction between atoms in the excited branch and a two-body inelastic decay to the attractive branch. To see the feature of this model, we have addressed, in the weak coupling regime, the excitation properties of a repulsive Fermi polaron as well as the time-dependent number density. The analytic expressions obtained for these quantities qualitatively show a good agreement with recent …
This article provides a brief review of how various spectroscopies have been used to investitage many-body quantum phenomena in the context of ultracold Fermi gases. In particular, work done with RF spectroscopy, Bragg spectroscopy and lattice modulation spectroscopy is considered. The theoretical basis of these spectroscopies, namely linear response theory in the many-body quantum physics context is briefly presented. Experiments related to the BCS-BEC crossover, imbalanced Fermi gases, polarons, possible pseudogap and Fermi liquid behaviour and measuring the contact are discussed. Remaining …
We report on the experimental observation of multiorbital polarons in a two-dimensional Fermi gas of $^{173}\mathrm{Yb}$ atoms formed by mobile impurities in the metastable $^3\mathrm{P}_0$ orbital and a Fermi sea in the ground-state $^1\mathrm{S}_0$ orbital. We spectroscopically probe the energies of attractive and repulsive polarons close to an orbital Feshbach resonance and characterize their coherence by measuring the quasiparticle residue. For all probed interaction parameters, the repulsive polaron is a long-lived quasiparticle with a decay rate more than 2 orders of magnitude below its …
The Fermi-polaron problem of a mobile impurity interacting with fermionic medium emerges in various contexts, ranging from the foundations of Landau's Fermi-liquid theory to electron-exciton interaction in semiconductors, to unusual properties of high-temperature superconductors. While classically the medium provides only a dissipative environment to the impurity, quantum picture of polaronic dressing is more intricate and arises from the interplay of few- and many-body aspects of the problem. The conventional expectation for the dynamics of Fermi polarons is that it is dissipative in characte…
We study a quantum impurity possessing both translational and internal rotational degrees of freedom interacting with a bosonic bath. Such a system corresponds to a `rotating polaron', which can be used to model, e.g., a rotating molecule immersed in an ultracold Bose gas or superfluid Helium. We derive the Hamiltonian of the rotating polaron and study its spectrum in the weak- and strong-coupling regimes using a combination of variational, diagrammatic, and mean-field approaches. We reveal how the coupling between linear and angular momenta affects stable quasiparticle states, and demonstrate…
Polarons in atomic gases and two-dimensional semiconductors
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya(加泰罗尼亚理工大学);Heidelberg University(海德堡大学);ETH Zürich(苏黎世联邦理工学院);Massachusetts Institute of Technology(麻省理工学院);Aarhus University(奥胡斯大学)
The interplay between measurement and quantum correlations in many-body systems can lead to novel types of collective phenomena which are not accessible in isolated systems. In this work, we merge the Zeno-paradigm of quantum measurement theory with the concept of polarons in condensed-matter physics. The resulting quantum-Zeno Fermi-polaron is a quasi-particle which emerges for lossy impurities interacting with a quantum-degenerate bath of fermions. For loss rates of the order of the impurity-fermion binding energy the quasi-particle is short lived. However, we show that in the strongly dissi…
We have calculated the zero-temperature binding energy of a single impurity atom immersed in a Bose-Einstein condensate of ultracold atoms that are trapped in an axially symmetric harmonic potential, where the impurity interacts with bosonic atoms in the condensate via a low-energy s-wave scattering. In this case, bosons are excited around the impurity to form a quasiparticle, namely, a BEC polaron. We have developed a variational method, {\it a la} Lee-Low-Pines (LLP) theory for electron-phonon systems, for description of the polaron with a conserved angular momentum around the symmetric axis…
The well-known Yukawa and Efimov potentials are two different mediated interaction potentials. The first one arises in quantum field theory from the exchange of virtual particles. The second one is mediated by a real particle resonantly interacting with two other particles. This Letter shows how two impurities immersed in a Bose-Einstein condensate can exhibit both phenomena. For a weak impurity-boson attractive interactionattraction with the condensate, the two impurities form two polarons that interact through a weak Yukawa attraction mediated by virtual excitations. For a resonant attractio…
Efficient variational approach to the Fermi polaron problem in two dimensions, both in and out of equilibrium
Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院理论物理研究所);University of Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院大学);ETH Zurich(苏黎世联邦理工学院);Harvard University(哈佛大学)