We show that atomic Fermi mixtures with density and mass imbalance exhibit a rich diversity of scaling laws for the quasiparticle decay rate beyond the quadratic energy and temperature dependence of conventional Fermi liquids. For certain densities and mass ratios, the decay rate is linear, whereas in other cases, it exhibits a plateau. Remarkably, this plateau extends from the deeply degenerate to the high temperature classical regime of the light species. Many of these scaling laws are analogous to what is found in very different systems, including dirty metals, liquid metals, and high temperature plasmas. The Fermi mixtures can in this sense span a whole range of seemingly diverse and separate physical systems. Our results are derived in the weakly interacting limit, making them quantitatively reliable. The different regimes can be detected with radio-frequency spectroscopy.
We show that atomic Fermi mixtures with density and mass imbalance exhibit a rich diversity of scaling laws for the quasiparticle decay rate beyond the quadratic energy and temperature dependence of conventional Fermi liquids. For certain densities and mass ratios, the decay rate is linear, whereas in other cases, it exhibits a plateau. Remarkably, this plateau extends from the deeply degenerate to the high temperature classical regime of the light species. Many of these scaling laws are analogous to what is found in very different systems, including dirty metals, liquid metals, and high temperature plasmas. The Fermi mixtures can in this sense span a whole range of seemingly diverse and separate physical systems. Our results are derived in the weakly interacting limit, making them quantitatively reliable. The different regimes can be detected with radio-frequency spectroscopy.
We show that the measurement of the quasiparticle lifetime can reveal new Fermi liquid regimes in atom mixtures with density and/or mass imbalance. In these recently created mixtures, the existence of two Fermi energies leads to novel and unusual Fermi liquids where the quasiparticle decay rate is no longer quadratic in energy and temperature. For certain densities and mass ratios, the decay rate exhibits a linear scaling similar to that of marginal Femi liquids, whereas in other regimes it exhibits a plateau. It is demonstrated that this novel Fermi liquid behaviour can extend to rather high temperatures which are within current experimental reach. The novel Fermi liquid regimes can be detected with radio-frequency spectroscopy.
We study the thermal evolution of a highly spin-imbalanced, homogeneous Fermi gas with unitarity limited interactions, from a Fermi liquid of polarons at low temperatures to a classical Boltzmann gas at high temperatures. Radio-frequency spectroscopy gives access to the energy, lifetime, and short-range correlations of Fermi polarons at low temperatures T. In this regime, we observe a characteristic T^{2} dependence of the spectral width, corresponding to the quasiparticle decay rate expected for a Fermi liquid. At high T, the spectral width decreases again towards the scattering rate of the classical, unitary Boltzmann gas, ∝T^{-1/2}. In the transition region between the quantum degenerate and classical regime, the spectral width attains its maximum, on the scale of the Fermi energy, indicating the breakdown of a quasiparticle description. Density measurements in a harmonic trap directly reveal the majority dressing cloud surrounding the minority spins and yield the compressibility along with the effective mass of Fermi polarons.
In a one-dimensional weakly interacting Bose-Fermi mixture, one branch of elementary excitations is well described by the Bogoliubov spectrum. Here we use the microscopic theory to study the decay of such quasiparticle excitations. The main scattering process which leads to their decay is the backscattering of a Bogoliubov quasiparticle off the Fermi sea, where a particle-hole pair is excited. For a low-momentum quasiparticle (phonon) of momentum q, we find that the decay rate scales as q3 provided q is smaller than the Fermi momentum kF, while in the opposite case the decay behaves as q2. If the ratio of the masses of fermions and bosons is equal to the ratio of the boson-fermion and the boson-boson interaction strengths, the decay rate changes dramatically. It scales as q7 for q<kF, while we find q6 scaling at q>kF. For a high-momentum Bogoliubov quasiparticle, we find a constant decay rate for q<kF, while it scales as 1/q for q>kF. We also find an analytic expression for the decay rate in the crossover region between low and high momenta. The decay rate is a continuous, but nonanalytic function of the momentum at q=kF. In the special case when the parameters of our system correspond to the integrable model, we observe that the decay rate vanishes.
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 turns negative, thereby indicating that the repulsive Fermi liquid state becomes energetically and thermodynamically unstable.
Pauli blocking in Fermi liquids imposes strong phase-space constraints on quasiparticle lifetimes, leading to a well-known quadratic-in-temperature decay rate of quasiparticle modes at low temperatures. In two-dimensional systems, however, even longer-lived modes are predicted (dubbed “odd-parity” modes) that involve a collective deformation of the Fermi distribution. Here, we present an efficient method to evaluate the full spectrum of relaxational eigenmodes of a Fermi liquid within kinetic theory. We employ this method to study the experimentally relevant case of a Fermi liquid with screened Coulomb interactions and map out the decay rates of quasiparticle modes beyond the asymptotic low-temperature limit up to the Fermi temperature, thus covering the entire temperature range of typical experiments. We confirm the existence of anomalously long-lived odd-parity modes and provide a comprehensive classification and detailed analysis of the relaxation spectrum. In particular, we find that (i) the odd-parity effect in the decay rates extends to temperatures as large as T = 0.15 T F , (ii) there is only a small number of long-lived odd-parity modes, with an infinite number of remaining modes that show standard Fermi-liquid scaling, and (iii) the ratio between the odd- and even-parity lifetimes is tunable with the Coulomb interaction strength, in addition to temperature, which reflects a difference in the microscopic relaxation mechanism of the modes. Our findings provide a comprehensive description of the nonequilibrium relaxation behavior of two-dimensional electron gases and bridge a significant gap in our understanding of these systems.
We analytically study the inelastic lifetime of quasiparticles due to particle-particle interactions in a three-dimensional Fermi liquid approaching a density-wave instability. Using the G0W approximation, we find that the softening of the dielectric function significantly enhances the quasiparticle decay rate near the instability. While the zero-temperature quasiparticle lifetime at the Fermi surface generally follows a ∣εk−εF∣−α divergence with α=2, we observe α=0.5 at the instability point and α=1 within the density-wave phase. Moreover, we demonstrate that the renormalization constant Z is substantially suppressed as the instability is approached, enhancing the effective mass. We extend our analysis to ultra-cold Rydberg-dressed Fermi liquids, where the soft-core interactions promote density-wave instability, and find that our numerical G0W results are in excellent agreement with our analytic predictions for quasiparticle lifetime, renormalization constant, and effective mass.