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arXiv:1302.3505 · Physical Review B

Quasiparticle properties of an impurity in a Fermi gas

Jonas Vlietinck, J. Ryckebusch, Kris Van Houcke

Published Mar 25, 2013• 73 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We report a study of a spin-down impurity strongly coupled to a spin-up Fermi sea (a so-called Fermi polaron) with the diagrammatic Monte Carlo (DiagMC) technique. Conditions of zero temperature and three dimensions are considered for an ultracold atomic gas with resonant interactions in the zero-range limit. A Feynman diagrammatic series is developed for the one-body and two-body propagators providing information about the polaron and molecule channel, respectively. The DiagMC technique allows us to reach diagram orders that are high enough for extrapolation to infinite order. The robustness of the extracted results is examined by checking various resummation techniques and by running the simulations with various choices for the propagators and vertex functions. It turns out that dressing the lines in the diagrams as much as possible is not always the optimal choice. We also identify classes of dominant diagrams for the one-body and two-body self-energy in the region of strong interaction. These dominant diagrams turn out to be the leading processes of the strong-coupling limit. The quasiparticle energies and $Z$ factor are obtained as a function of the interaction strength. We find that the DiagMC results for the molecule and polaron properties are very similar to those obtained with a variational ansatz. Surprisingly, this variational ansatz gives very good predictions for the quasiparticle residue even when this residue is significantly less than 1.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.87.115133

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We report a study of a spin-down impurity strongly coupled to a spin-up Fermi sea (a so-called Fermi polaron) with the diagrammatic Monte Carlo (DiagMC) technique. Conditions of zero temperature and three dimensions are considered for an ultracold atomic gas with resonant interactions in the zero-range limit. A Feynman diagrammatic series is developed for the one-body and two-body propagators providing information about the polaron and molecule channel, respectively. The DiagMC technique allows us to reach diagram orders that are high enough for extrapolation to infinite order. The robustness of the extracted results is examined by checking various resummation techniques and by running the simulations with various choices for the propagators and vertex functions. It turns out that dressing the lines in the diagrams as much as possible is not always the optimal choice. We also identify classes of dominant diagrams for the one-body and two-body self-energy in the region of strong interaction. These dominant diagrams turn out to be the leading processes of the strong-coupling limit. The quasiparticle energies and ZZZ factor are obtained as a function of the interaction strength. We find that the DiagMC results for the molecule and polaron properties are very similar to those obtained with a variational ansatz. Surprisingly, this variational ansatz gives very good predictions for the quasiparticle residue even when this residue is significantly less than 1.
We report on a study of a spin-down impurity strongly coupled to a spin-up Fermi sea (a so-called Fermi polaron) with the diagrammatic Monte-Carlo (DiagMC) technique.Conditions of zero temperature and three dimensions are considered for an ultracold atomic gas with resonant interactions in the zero-range limit.A Feynman diagrammatic series is developed for the one-body and two-body propagators providing information about the polaron and molecule channel respectively.The DiagMC technique allows us to reach diagram orders that are high enough for extrapolation to infinite order.The robustness of the extracted results is examined by checking various resummation techniques and by running the simulations with various choices for the propagators and vertex functions.It turns out that dressing the lines in the diagrams as much as possible is not always the optimal choice.We also identify classes of dominant diagrams for the one-body and two-body self-energy in the region of strong interaction.These dominant diagrams turn out to be the leading processes of the strong-coupling limit.The quasiparticle energies and Z-factor are obtained as a function of the interaction strength.We find that the DiagMC results for the molecule and polaron properties are very similar to those obtained with a variational ansatz.Surprisingly, this variational ansatz gives very good predictions for the quasiparticle residue even when this residue is significantly smaller than one.
We study the properties of the two-dimensional Fermi polaron model in which an impurity attractively interacts with a Fermi sea of particles in the zero-range limit. We use a diagrammatic Monte Carlo (DiagMC) method which allows us to sample a Feynman diagrammatic series to very high order. The convergence properties of the series and the role of multiple particle-hole excitations are discussed. We study the polaron and molecule energy as a function of the coupling strength, revealing a transition from a polaron to a molecule in the ground state. We find a value for the critical interaction strength which complies with the experimentally measured one and predictions from variational methods. For all considered interaction strengths, the polaron ZZZ factor from the full diagrammatic series almost coincides with the one-particle-hole result. We also formally link the DiagMC and the variational approaches for the polaron problem at hand.
We consider a mobile impurity coupled to an ideal Fermi gas in one spatial dimension through an attractive contact interaction. We calculate the quasi-particle residue ZZZ exactly, based on Bethe Ansatz and diagrammatic Monte Carlo methods, and with varational Ansatz up to one particle-hole excitation of the Fermi sea. We find that the exact quasi-particle residue vanishes in the thermodynamic limit as a power law in the number of particles, consistent with the Luttinger-liquid paradigm and the breakdown of Fermi-liquid theory. The variational Ansatz, however, predicts a finite value of ZZZ, even in the thermodynamic limit. We also study how the presence of the impurity affects the density of the spin-up sea by calculating the pair correlation function. Subtracting the homogeneous background and integrating over all distances gives the charge QQQ. This charge turns out to grow continuously from 0 at zero coupling to 1 in the strong-coupling limit. The varational Ansatz predicts Q=0Q=0Q=0 at all couplings. So, although the variational Ansatz has been shown to be remarkably accurate for the energy and the effective mass, it fails even qualitatively when predicting ZZZ and the pair correlation function in the thermodynamic limit.
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 us 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 stability of the quasiparticle and allows us to locate in addition also the repulsive polaron as an excited state. The quantitative exactness of two-particle-hole wave functions is investigated, resulting in a relative lowering of polaronic energies in the mass-imbalance phase diagram. Tan's contact coefficient for the mass-balanced polaron system is found in good agreement with variational methods. Mass-imbalanced systems can be studied experimentally by ultracold atom mixtures such as $^{6}\mathrm{Li}\ensuremath{-}^{40}\mathrm{K}$.
A single down-spin fermion with an attractive zero-range interaction with a Fermi sea of up-spin fermions forms a polaronic quasiparticle. The associated quasiparticle weight vanishes beyond a critical strength of the attractive interaction, where a many-body bound state is formed. From a variational wave function in the molecular limit, we determine the critical value for the polaron-to-molecule transition. The value agrees well with the diagrammatic Monte Carlo results of Prokof'ev and Svistunov and is consistent with recent rf-spectroscopy measurements of the quasiparticle weight by Schirotzek et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 230402 (2009)]. In addition, we calculate the contact coefficient of the strongly imbalanced gas, using the adiabatic theorem of Tan and discuss the implications of the polaron-to-molecule transition for the phase diagram of the attractive Fermi gas at finite imbalance.
Understanding the behavior of an impurity strongly interacting with a Fermi sea is a long-standing challenge in many-body physics. When the interactions are short-ranged, two vastly different ground states exist: a polaron quasiparticle and a molecule dressed by the majority atoms. In the single-impurity limit, it is predicted that at a critical interaction strength, a first-order transition occurs between these two states. Experiments, however, are always conducted in the finite temperature and impurity density regime. The fate of the polaron-to-molecule transition under these conditions, where the statistics of quantum impurities and thermal effects become relevant, is still unknown. Here, we address this question experimentally and theoretically. Our experiments are performed with a spin-imbalanced ultracold Fermi gas with tunable interactions. Utilizing a novel Raman spectroscopy combined with a high-sensitivity fluorescence detection technique, we isolate the quasiparticle contribution and extract the polaron energy, spectral weight, and the contact parameter. As the interaction strength is increased, we observe a continuous variation of all observables, in particular a smooth reduction of the quasiparticle weight as it goes to zero beyond the transition point. Our observation is in good agreement with a theoretical model where polaron and molecule quasiparticle states are thermally occupied according to their quantum statistics. At the experimental conditions, polaron states are hence populated even at interactions where the molecule is the ground state and vice versa. The emerging physical picture is thus that of a smooth transition between polarons and molecules and a coexistence of both in the region around the expected transition.