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arXiv:1110.3143 · Physical Review A

Polarons in extremely polarized Fermi gases: The strongly interacting 6 Li- 40 K mixture

J. E. Baarsma, J. Armaitis, R. A. Duine, Henk T. C. Stoof

Published Mar 23, 2012• 24 citations
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Abstract

We study the extremely polarized two-component Fermi gas with a mass imbalance in the strongly interacting regime. Specifically we focus on the experimentally available mixture of ${}^{6}$Li and ${}^{40}$K atoms. In this regime spin polarons, i.e., dressed minority atoms, form. We consider the spectral function for the minority atoms, from which the lifetime and the effective mass of the spin polaron can be determined. Moreover, we predict the radio-frequency (rf) spectrum and the momentum distribution for the spin polarons for experiments with ${}^{6}$Li and ${}^{40}$K atoms. Subsequently we study the relaxation of the motion of the Fermi polaron due to spin drag.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.85.033631

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We study the extremely polarized two-component Fermi gas with a mass imbalance in the strongly interacting regime. Specifically we focus on the experimentally available mixture of 6{}^{6}6Li and 40{}^{40}40K atoms. In this regime spin polarons, i.e., dressed minority atoms, form. We consider the spectral function for the minority atoms, from which the lifetime and the effective mass of the spin polaron can be determined. Moreover, we predict the radio-frequency (rf) spectrum and the momentum distribution for the spin polarons for experiments with 6{}^{6}6Li and 40{}^{40}40K atoms. Subsequently we study the relaxation of the motion of the Fermi polaron due to spin drag.
In this thesis, we study two-component Fermi mixtures in the presence of both a mass and a population imbalance. For a large part we focus on the experimentally available 6Li-40K mixture and on the phase transitions that can occur in this mixture. In the first part of this thesis, we study the extremely polarized two-component Fermi gas with a mass imbalance in the strongly interacting regime. Specifically, we focus on the mixture of 6Li and 40K atoms. In this interaction regime spin polarons, i.e., dressed minority atoms, form. We consider the spectral function for the minority atoms, from which the lifetime and the effective mass of the spin polaron can be determined. Moreover, we predict the radio-frequency spectrum and the momentum distribution for the spin polarons for experiments with 6Li and 40K atoms. Subsequently we study the relaxation of the motion of the Fermi polaron due to spin drag. In the second part, we develop an accurate theory of resonantly interacting Fermi mixtures with both spin and mass imbalance. We consider Fermi mixtures with arbitrary mass imbalances, but focus in particular on the 6Li-40K mixture. We determine the phase diagram of the mixture for different interaction strengths that lie on the BCS side of the Feshbach resonance. We also determine the universal phase diagram at unitarity. We find for the mixtures with a sufficiently large mass imbalance, that includes the 6Li-40K mixture, a Lifshitz point in the universal phase diagram that signals an instability towards a supersolid phase. In the last part of the thesis, we show that the ultracold three-dimensional 6Li-40K mixture at unitarity can exhibit the highly exotic Larkin-Ovchinnikov superfluid phase. We determine the phase diagram for majorities of 40K atoms within mean-field theory taking the inhomogeneities of the fermion states into account exactly. We find two different inhomogeneous superfluid phases in mixtures with a majority of 40K atoms, namely the Larkin-Ovchinnikov (LO) phase with one inhomogeneous direction and a cubic phase (LO3) where three spatial translational symmetries are broken. We determine the transition between these two phases by solving the Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations in the superfluid LO phase. Subsequently, we calculate the atomic density modulation of the atoms in the LO phase and show that it is sufficiently large to be visible in experiment.
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 selfconsistent manner. By analyzing the spectral function at finite impurity concentration, we extract the attractive and repulsive polaron energies. We find that a renormalization of majority atoms via an interaction with minority atoms is of significance to depict the many-polaron regime.
We present details of an experimental platform for studying Fermi polarons in a quantum-gas mixture. The system consists of about a thousand bosonic 133^{133}133Cs impurities immersed in a deeply degenerate Fermi gas (T/TF∼0.2T/T_F \sim 0.2T/TF​∼0.2) of approximately 2×1052\times 10^52×105 6^66Li atoms in a single hyperfine state, with interspecies interactions tunable via a Feshbach resonance. Using optical Raman spectroscopy without relative momentum transfer, we perform injection spectroscopy and thereby create the Fermi polaron. Owing to the large mass imbalance between the two species, the setup provides access to previously unexplored regimes of Fermi polarons.
We consider an imbalanced mixture of two different ultracold Fermi gases, which are strongly interacting. Calling spin-down the minority component and spin-up the majority component, the limit of small relative density $x={n}_{\ensuremath{\downarrow}}/{n}_{\ensuremath{\uparrow}}$ is usually considered as a gas of noninteracting polarons. This allows us to calculate, in the expansion of the total energy of the system in powers of xxx, the terms proportional to xxx (corresponding to the binding energy of the polaron) and to x5/3{x}^{5/3}x5/3 (corresponding to the kinetic energy of the polaron Fermi sea). We investigate in this paper terms physically due to an interaction between polarons and which are proportional to x2{x}^{2}x2 and x7/3{x}^{7/3}x7/3. We find three such terms. The first one corresponds to the overlap between the clouds dressing two polarons. The two other ones are due to the modification of the single polaron binding energy caused by the nonzero density of polarons. The second term is due to the restriction of the polaron momentum by the Fermi sea formed by the other polarons. The last one results from the modification of the spin-up Fermi sea brought by the other polarons. The calculation of all these terms is made at the simplest level of a single particle-hole excitation. It is performed for all the possible interaction strengths within the stability range of the polaron. At unitarity the last two terms give a fairly weak contribution while the first one is strong and leads to a marked disagreement with Monte Carlo results. The possible origins of this discrepancy are discussed.
We analyze when a repulsively interacting two-component Fermi gas becomes thermodynamically unstable against phase separation. We focus on the strongly polarized limit, where the free energy of the homogeneous mixture can be calculated accurately in terms of well-defined quasiparticles, the repulsive polarons. Phase diagrams as a function of polarization, temperature, mass imbalance, and repulsive polaron energy, as well as scattering length and range parameter, are provided. We show that the lifetime of the repulsive polaron increases significantly with the interaction range and the mass of the minority atoms, raising the prospects of detecting the transition to the elusive itinerant ferromagnetic state with ultracold atoms.
We examine pairing and molecule formation in strongly interacting Fermi gases, and we discuss how radio-frequency (rf) spectroscopy can reveal these features. For the balanced case, the emergence of stable molecules in the Bose-Einstein condensation regime results in a two-peak structure in the rf spectrum with clearly visible medium effects on the low-energy part of the molecular wave function. For the highly imbalanced case, we show the existence of a well-defined quasiparticle (a spin polaron) on both sides of the Feshbach resonance, we evaluate its lifetime, and we illustrate how its energy may be measured by rf spectroscopy.