We study an impurity atom in a two-dimensional Fermi gas using variational wave functions for (i) an impurity dressed by particle-hole excitations (polaron) and (ii) a dimer consisting of the impurity and a majority atom. In contrast to three dimensions, where similar calculations predict a sharp transition to a dimer state with increasing interspecies attraction, we show that the polaron Ansatz always gives a lower energy. However, the exact solution for a heavy impurity reveals that both a two-body bound state and distortions of the Fermi sea are crucial. This reflects the importance of particle-hole pairs in lower dimensions and makes simple variational calculations unreliable. We show that the energy of an impurity gives important information about its dressing cloud, for which both Ans\"atze give inaccurate results.
We study an impurity atom in a two-dimensional Fermi gas using variational wave functions for (i) an impurity dressed by particle-hole excitations (polaron) and (ii) a dimer consisting of the impurity and a majority atom. In contrast to three dimensions, where similar calculations predict a sharp transition to a dimer state with increasing interspecies attraction, we show that the polaron Ansatz always gives a lower energy. However, the exact solution for a heavy impurity reveals that both a two-body bound state and distortions of the Fermi sea are crucial. This reflects the importance of particle-hole pairs in lower dimensions and makes simple variational calculations unreliable. We show that the energy of an impurity gives important information about its dressing cloud, for which both Ans"atze give inaccurate results.
We address the problem of a single ``spin-down'' impurity atom interacting attractively with a spin-up Fermi gas in two dimensions (2D). We consider the case where the mass of the impurity is greater than or equal to the mass of a spin-up fermion. Using a variational approach, we resolve the questions raised by previous studies and show that there is, in fact, a transition between polaron and molecule (dimer) ground states in 2D. For the molecule state, we use a variational wave function with a single particle-hole excitation on the Fermi sea and we find that its energy matches that of the exact solution in the limit of infinite impurity mass. Thus, we expect the variational approach to provide a reliable tool for investigating 2D systems.
It has been commonly believed that a polaron-to-molecule transition occurs in three-dimensional (3D) and 2D Fermi polaron systems as the attraction between the single impurity and majority fermions gets stronger. The conclusion has been drawn from the separate treatment of polaron and molecule states and thus deserves a close reexamination. In this work, we explore the physics of polarons and molecules by utilizing a unified variational Ansatz with up to two particle-hole (ph) excitations (V-2ph). We confirm the existence of a first-order transition in 3D and 2D Fermi polarons, and we show that the nature of such a transition lies in an energy competition between systems with different momenta, $\mathbf{Q}=\mathbit{0}$ and ∣Q∣=kF; here Q is defined as the momentum of a Fermi polaron system with respect to the Fermi sea of majority fermions (with Fermi momentum kF). The literally proposed molecule Ansatz is identified as an asymptotic limit of the ∣Q∣=kF state in a strong-coupling regime, which implies a huge SO(3) (for 3D) or SO(2) (for 2D) ground-state degeneracy in this regime. The recognition of such degeneracy is crucially important for evaluating the molecule occupation in realistic systems with finite impurity density and at finite temperature. To compare with recent experiment of 3D Fermi polarons, we have calculated various physical quantities under the V-2ph framework, and we obtained results that are in good agreement with experimental data in the weak-coupling and near-resonance regime. Further, to check the validity of our conclusion in 2D, we have adopted a different variational method based on the Gaussian sample of high-order ph excitations (V-Gph), and we found the same conclusion on the nature of the polaron-molecule transition therein. For a 1D system, the V-2ph method predicts no sharp transition, and the ground state is always at the $\mathbf{Q}=\mathbit{0}$ sector, consistent with the exact Bethe-Ansatz solution. The presence/absence of a polaron-molecule transition is analyzed to be closely related to the interplay effect of Pauli-blocking and ph excitations in different dimensions.
We investigate a single impurity interacting with a free two-dimensional atomic Fermi gas. The interaction between the impurity and the gas is characterized by an arbitrary attractive short-range potential, which, in two dimensions, always admits a two-particle bound state. We provide analytical expressions for the energy and the effective mass of the dressed impurity by including the two-body bound state, which is crucial for strong interactions, in the integral equation for the effective interaction. Using the same method, we also give the results for the polaron parameters in one and three dimensions and find good agreement with previous results. Thus, our relations can be used as a simple way to estimate the polaron parameters once the two-body bound state of the interaction potential is known.
We investigate the highly polarized limit of a two-dimensional Fermi gas, where we effectively have a single spin-down impurity atom immersed in a spin-up Fermi sea. By constructing variational wave functions for the impurity, we map out the ground state phase diagram as a function of mass ratio ${m}_{\ensuremath{\uparrow}}/{m}_{\ensuremath{\downarrow}}$ and interaction strength. In particular, we determine when it is favorable for the dressed impurity (polaron) to bind particles from the Fermi sea to form a dimer, trimer, or even larger clusters. Similarly to three dimensions, we find that the Fermi sea favors the trimer state so that it exists for ${m}_{\ensuremath{\uparrow}}/{m}_{\ensuremath{\downarrow}}$ less than the critical mass ratio for trimer formation in the vacuum. We also find a region where dimers have finite momentum in the ground state, a scenario that corresponds to the Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov superfluid state in the limit of large spin imbalance. For equal masses (${m}_{\ensuremath{\uparrow}}={m}_{\ensuremath{\downarrow}}$), we compute rigorous bounds on the polaron-dimer transition, and we show that the polaron energy and residue is well captured by the variational approach, with the former quantity being in good agreement with experiment. When there is a finite density of impurities, we find that this polaron-dimer transition is preempted by a first-order superfluid-normal transition at zero temperature, but it remains an open question what happens at finite temperature.
Abstract Using the variational method, we study the properties of a spin-down impurity immersed in a one-dimensional (1D) spin-up Fermi sea. With repulsive interactions between them, the impurity is dressed up by surrounding particles in Fermi sea and forms a polaron. We clearly calculate the binding energy, effective mass, momentum distribution, Tan contact, and pair correlation. Even in strong repulsive regimes, the results can agree with the exact Bethe Ansatz results. The repulsive polaron energy E + is below Fermi energy E F and no negative effective masses are found in whole interaction regimes, unequal masses polarons are also calculated. We show a clear momentum distribution and calculate the Tan contact from three different aspects. Furthermore, we explore the particle-hole excitation and find that the hole terms in Fermi sea have a great influence on the polaron energy and contact in repulsive regime. These results show that the variational method can still be used effectively in 1D repulsive polaron system .
Abstract We study the polaron problem of an impurity immersed in the background of a Fermi sea confined in one-dimensional or two-dimensional isotropic traps. By changing the trapping potential from loose to tight, a dimensional crossover from anisotropically trapped three-dimensional to quasi-two-dimensional (quasi-2D) or quasi-one-dimensional (quasi-1D) configurations is investigated by calculating the ground-state energy in a wide range of interaction strength. We adopt a low-dimensional effective Hamiltonian in the form of a two-channel model, where the excited levels in the confined directions are described phenomenologically by a dressed molecule, and use the variational approach up to one pair of particle-hole fluctuations to calculate the energies of polaron and molecule states. We map out the phase diagrams for both quasi-1D and quasi-2D configurations and different mass ratios, and conclude that the polaron phase is preferable with tighter confinement and lighter impurity mass in lower dimensions. We also find that owing to the significant population of excited levels by strong interaction, a strictly low-dimensional system with all particles residing in the ground state of the trap can never work when study polaron-molecule transition, even in the tightly confined limit. This discrepancy has been observed in an experiment of quasi-2D gases of 40 K atoms and is well explained by our calculation.