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arXiv:1412.8175 · Physical Review Letters

Ab initio Lattice Results for Fermi Polarons in Two Dimensions

Shahin Bour, Dean Lee, H.‐W. Hammer, Ulf-G. Meißner

Published Oct 27, 2015• 32 citations
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Abstract

We investigate the attractive Fermi polaron problem in two dimensions using nonperturbative Monte Carlo simulations. We introduce a new Monte Carlo algorithm called the impurity lattice Monte Carlo method. This algorithm samples the path integral in a computationally efficient manner and has only small sign oscillations for systems with a single impurity. As a benchmark of the method, we calculate the universal polaron energy in three dimensions in the scale-invariant unitarity limit and find agreement with published results. We then present the first fully nonperturbative calculations of the polaron energy in two dimensions and density correlations between the impurity and majority particles in the limit of zero-range interactions. We find evidence for a smooth crossover transition from fermionic quasiparticle to molecular state as a function of the interaction strength.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.115.185301

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We investigate the attractive Fermi polaron problem in two dimensions using nonperturbative Monte Carlo simulations. We introduce a new Monte Carlo algorithm called the impurity lattice Monte Carlo method. This algorithm samples the path integral in a computationally efficient manner and has only small sign oscillations for systems with a single impurity. As a benchmark of the method, we calculate the universal polaron energy in three dimensions in the scale-invariant unitarity limit and find agreement with published results. We then present the first fully nonperturbative calculations of the polaron energy in two dimensions and density correlations between the impurity and majority particles in the limit of zero-range interactions. We find evidence for a smooth crossover transition from fermionic quasiparticle to molecular state as a function of the interaction strength.
We investigate the attractive Fermi polaron problem in two and three dimensions using non-perturbative Monte Carlo simulations. We introduce a new Monte Carlo algorithm called the impurity lattice Monte Carlo method. This algorithm samples the path integral in a computationally efficient manner and has only small sign oscillations for systems with a single impurity. To benchmark the method, we calculate the universal polaron energy in three dimensions in the scale-invariant unitarity limit and find agreement with published results. We then present the first fully non-perturbative calculations of the polaron energy in two dimensions in the limit of zero range interactions. We find evidence for a smooth crossover transition from a fermionic quasiparticle to a molecular state as a function of interaction strength with significant mixing between the two descriptions in the crossover region.
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.
A two-dimensional (2D) spin-up ideal Fermi gas interacting attractively with a spin-down impurity in the continuum undergoes, at zero temperature, a first-order phase transition from a polaron to a dimeron state. Here, we study a similar system on a square lattice, by considering the attractive 2D Fermi-Hubbard model with a single spin-down and a finite filling fraction of spin-up fermions. We study polaron and dimeron quasiparticle properties via variational ansatz up to one particle-hole excitation. Moreover, we develop a determinant diagrammatic Monte Carlo algorithm for this problem based on expansion in bare on-site coupling U . This algorithm turns out to be sign-problem-free at any filling of spin-up fermions, allowing one to sample very high diagram order (larger than 200 in our study) and to do simulations for large U / t (we go up to U / t = − 20 with t the hopping strength). Both methods give qualitatively consistent results. With variational ansatz we go to even larger on-site attraction. At very low spin-up filling fraction, we observe the polaron-to-dimeron transition, in agreement with the continuum case. Upon increasing the filling fraction, however, the transition shifts to higher values of | U | / t and the transition disappears beyond a filling fraction of about 20 % . In this region, the polaron state always gives a lower energy and has a finite quasiparticle residue. Our findings are directly relevant to cold atom experiments with 2D optical lattices: A small and finite density of spin-down impurities in the ground state will form a superfluid at strong coupling at low spin-up filling fraction. Above some critical spin-up filling fraction, the system is expected to remain a normal Fermi liquid, even in the strong-coupling limit.
We have used the auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (AFQMC) many-body approach on the lattice to study the equation of state for a fermionic impurity interacting with a background sea of spin-polarized fermions. The impurity, or polaron, is an interesting system in both cold atomic and nuclear physics. Our approach is general, and we are able to straightforwardly study the polaron across these regimes. We first study the Fermi polaron at unitarity and for a wide range of scattering lengths, comparing against previous theoretical and experimental studies. We then explore the neutron polaron which has been shown to be an important constraint for nuclear physics. We have also employed the recently developed parametric matrix model to emulate AFQMC solutions to the two-body problem on the lattice, to accelerate the tuning of our lattice Hamiltonian parameters directly to two-body energies in a periodic box, following Luscher's formula. Our lattice quantum Monte Carlo results for the polaron in both a cold atomic and nuclear physics context can serve as stringent benchmarks for future theoretical and experimental research.
We develop a non-Gaussian variational approach that enables us to study both equilibrium and far-from-equilibrium physics of the two-dimensional Fermi polaron. This method provides an unbiased analysis of the polaron-to-molecule phase transition without relying on truncations in the total number of particle-hole excitations. Our results—which include the ground-state energy and quasiparticle residue—are in qualitative agreement with the known Monte Carlo calculations. The main advantage of the non-Gaussian states compared to conventional numerical methods is that they enable us to explore long-time polaron evolution and, in particular, study various spectral properties accessible to both solid-state and ultracold atom experiments. We design two types of radiofrequency spectroscopies to measure polaronic and molecular spectral functions. Depending on the parameter regime, we find that these spectral functions and fermionic density profiles near the impurity either display long-lived oscillations between the repulsive and attractive polaron branches or exhibit fast relaxational dynamics to the molecular state.
The Fermi polaron problem, which describes a mobile impurity that interacts with a spin-polarized Fermi sea, is a paradigmatic system in quantum many-body physics and has been challenging to address quantitatively in its strong coupling regime. We present the first controlled thermodynamic calculations for the Fermi polaron at strong coupling using finite-temperature auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (AFMC) methods in the framework of the canonical ensemble. Modeled as a spin-imbalanced system, the Fermi polaron has a Monte Carlo sign problem, but we show that it is moderate over a wide range of temperatures and coupling strengths beyond the unitary limit of the BCS-BEC crossover. We calculate the contact, a quantity which measures the strength of the short-range correlations, as a function of temperature at unitarity and as a function of the coupling strength at fixed temperature and find good agreement with a variational approach based on one particle-hole excitation of the Fermi sea. We compare our results for the contact with recent experiments and find good agreement at unitarity (within error bars) but discrepancies away from unitarity on the BEC side of the crossover. We also calculate the thermal energy gap at unitarity as a function of temperature.