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arXiv:1512.08665 · Physical Review A

Fermi polaron in a one-dimensional quasiperiodic optical lattice: The simplest many-body localization challenge

Hui Hu, Anbang Wang, Su Yi, Xia-Ji Liu

Published May 2, 2016• 16 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We theoretically investigate the behavior of a moving impurity immersed in a sea of fermionic atoms that are confined in a quasiperiodic (bichromatic) optical lattice within a standard variational approach. We consider both repulsive and attractive contact interactions for such a simple many-body localization problem of Fermi polarons. The variational approach enables us to access relatively large systems and therefore may be used to understand many-body localization in the thermodynamic limit. The energy and wave function of the polaron states are found to be strongly affected by the quasirandom lattice potential and their experimental measurements (i.e., via radio-frequency spectroscopy or quantum gas microscope) therefore provide a sensitive way to underpin the localization transition. We determine a phase diagram by calculating two critical quasirandom disorder strengths, which correspond to the onset of the localization of the ground-state polaron state and the many-body localization of all polaron states, respectively. Our predicted phase diagram could be straightforwardly examined in current cold-atom experiments.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.93.053601

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We theoretically investigate the behavior of a moving impurity immersed in a sea of fermionic atoms that are confined in a quasiperiodic (bichromatic) optical lattice within a standard variational approach. We consider both repulsive and attractive contact interactions for such a simple many-body localization problem of Fermi polarons. The variational approach enables us to access relatively large systems and therefore may be used to understand many-body localization in the thermodynamic limit. The energy and wave function of the polaron states are found to be strongly affected by the quasirandom lattice potential and their experimental measurements (i.e., via radio-frequency spectroscopy or quantum gas microscope) therefore provide a sensitive way to underpin the localization transition. We determine a phase diagram by calculating two critical quasirandom disorder strengths, which correspond to the onset of the localization of the ground-state polaron state and the many-body localization of all polaron states, respectively. Our predicted phase diagram could be straightforwardly examined in current cold-atom experiments.
We theoretically investigate the behavior of a mobile impurity immersed in a one-dimensional quasiperiodic Fermi system with topological ppp-wave superfluidity. This polaron problem is solved by using a standard variational approach, the so-called Chevy ansatz. The polaron states are found to be strongly affected by the strength of the quasidisorder and the amplitude of the ppp-wave pairing. We analyze the phase diagram of the polaron ground state and find four phases: two extended phases, a weakly localized phase, and a strongly localized phase. It is remarkable that these polaron phases are directly corresponding to the four distinct phases experienced by the underlying background Fermi system. In particular, the weakly localized polaron phase corresponds to an intriguing critical phase of the Fermi system. Therefore, the different phases of the background system can be unambiguously probed by measuring the polaron properties via radio-frequency spectroscopy. We also investigate the high-lying polaron excited states at an infinite temperature and address the possibility of studying many-body localization of these states. We find that the introduction of ppp-wave pairing may delocalize the many-body localized states and make the system easier to thermalize. Our results could be observed in current state-of-the-art cold-atom experiments.
Recently, the topics of many-body localization (MBL) and one-dimensional strongly interacting few-body systems have received a lot of interest. These two topics have been largely developed separately. However, the generality of the latter as far as external potentials are concerned—including random and quasirandom potentials—and their shared spatial dimensionality, makes it an interesting way of dealing with MBL in the strongly interacting regime. Utilising tools developed for few-body systems we look to gain insight into the localization properties of the spin in a Fermi gas with strong interactions. We observe a delocalized–localized transition over a range of fillings of a quasirandom lattice. We find this transition to be of a different nature for low and high fillings, due to the diluteness of the system for low fillings.
The Fermi polaron, formed by an impurity interacting with a surrounding Fermi sea, exemplifies the canonical quasiparticle concept as a cornerstone in our description of quantum many-body systems across a wide range of energy scales. Experiments on atomic quantum gases have provided profound insights into the universal nature of the Fermi polaron. While most previous studies have focused on the case of zero impurity momentum, finite-momentum properties have remained largely uncharted. Here, we investigate the moving Fermi polaron by combining a novel Raman acceleration scheme with high-precision radio-frequency spectroscopy, exploring the quasiparticle dispersion relation over a wide range of momenta. We compare our measurements of energy shifts and spectral linewidths with a microscopic theory and reach quantitative agreement for all momenta. For low momenta, we find the energy of the moving polaron to be fully consistent with the Fermi liquid picture of a dressed particle with a constant effective mass. At high momenta, the polaron approaches the behavior of a weakly interacting bare particle, featuring small energy shifts and weak broadening. For intermediate momenta, broadening is generally larger and, most strikingly, the behavior differs for attractive and repulsive polarons. While the repulsive polaron exhibits a smooth connection between both regimes along with a monotonic change of the energy shift, the attractive case shows a peculiar non-monotonic behavior. With increasing momentum, the attractive polaron enters a regime where its energy deviates from the constant effective mass expression and broadening suddenly increases. By comparing this observation with theory, we show that this abrupt behavior coincides with the attractive polaron entering a molecule-hole continuum, where it is no longer the ground state. We interpret this as a motion-induced polaron-molecule transition.
Many-body localization (MBL), the disorder-induced localization of interacting particles, signals a breakdown of conventional thermodynamics because MBL systems do not thermalize and show nonergodic time evolution. We experimentally observed this nonergodic evolution for interacting fermions in a one-dimensional quasirandom optical lattice and identified the MBL transition through the relaxation dynamics of an initially prepared charge density wave. For sufficiently weak disorder, the time evolution appears ergodic and thermalizing, erasing all initial ordering, whereas above a critical disorder strength, a substantial portion of the initial ordering persists. The critical disorder value shows a distinctive dependence on the interaction strength, which is in agreement with numerical simulations. Our experiment paves the way to further detailed studies of MBL, such as in noncorrelated disorder or higher dimensions.
We investigate the formation of bound states made of two interacting atoms moving in a one dimensional (1D) quasiperiodic optical lattice. We derive the quantum phase diagram for Anderson localization of both attractively and repulsively bound pairs. We calculate the pair binding energy and show analytically that its behavior as a function of the interaction strength depends crucially on the nature-extended, multifractal, localized-of the single-particle atomic states. Experimental implications of our results are discussed.
We investigate the zero-temperature metal-insulator transition in a one-dimensional two-component Fermi gas in the presence of a quasiperiodic potential resulting from the superposition of two optical lattices of equal intensity but incommensurate periods. A mobility edge separating (low-energy) Anderson localized and (high-energy) extended single-particle states appears in this continuous-space model beyond a critical intensity of the quasiperiodic potential. To discern the metallic phase from the insulating phase in the interacting many-fermion system, we employ unbiased quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) simulations combined with the many-particle localization length familiar from the modern theory of the insulating state. In the noninteracting limit, the critical optical-lattice intensity for the metal-insulator transition predicted by the QMC simulations coincides with the Anderson localization transition of the single-particle eigenstates. We show that weak repulsive interactions induce a shift of this critical point towards larger intensities, meaning that repulsion favors metallic behavior. This shift appears to be linear in the interaction parameter, suggesting that even infinitesimal interactions can affect the position of the critical point.