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arXiv:1606.03721 · Physical Review A

Mobile impurity in a Fermi sea from the functional renormalization group analytically continued to real time

Kazuhiko Kamikado, Takuya Kanazawa, Shun Uchino

Published Jan 17, 2017• 24 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Motivated by experiments with cold atoms, we investigate a mobile impurity immersed in a Fermi sea in three dimensions at zero temperature by means of the functional renormalization group. We first perform the derivative expansion of the effective action to calculate the ground-state energy and Tan's contact across the polaron-molecule transition for several mass imbalances. Next we study quasiparticle properties of the impurity by using a real-time method recently developed in nuclear physics, which allows one to go beyond the derivative expansion. We obtain the spectral function of the polaron and the effective mass and quasiparticle weight of attractive and repulsive polarons, and clarify how they are affected by mass imbalances.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.95.013612

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cond-mat.quant-gasCross-listedarXiv:2606.21567•Jun 22, 2026•0 citations
Motivated by experiments with cold atoms, we investigate a mobile impurity immersed in a Fermi sea in three dimensions at zero temperature by means of the functional renormalization group. We first perform the derivative expansion of the effective action to calculate the ground-state energy and Tan's contact across the polaron-molecule transition for several mass imbalances. Next we study quasiparticle properties of the impurity by using a real-time method recently developed in nuclear physics, which allows one to go beyond the derivative expansion. We obtain the spectral function of the polaron and the effective mass and quasiparticle weight of attractive and repulsive polarons, and clarify how they are affected by mass imbalances.
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 $^{6}\mathrm{Li}\ensuremath{-}^{40}\mathrm{K}$.
We theoretically investigate how quasiparticle properties of an attractive Fermi polaron are affected by nonzero temperature and finite impurity concentration in three dimensions and in free space. By applying both non-self-consistent and self-consistent many-body TTT-matrix theories, we calculate the polaron energy (including decay rate), effective mass, and residue, as functions of temperature and impurity concentration. The temperature and concentration dependencies are weak on the BCS side with a negative impurity-medium scattering length. Toward the strong attraction regime across the unitary limit, we find sizable dependencies. In particular, with increasing temperature the effective mass quickly approaches the bare mass and the residue is significantly enhanced. At temperature $T\ensuremath{\sim}0.1{T}_{F}$, where TF{T}_{F}TF​ is the Fermi temperature of the background Fermi sea, the residual polaron-polaron interaction seems to become attractive. This leads to a notable down-shift in the polaron energy. We show that, by taking into account the temperature and impurity concentration effects, the measured polaron energy in the first Fermi polaron experiment [Schirotzek , Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 230402 (2009)] could be better theoretically explained.
We present a systematic study of a mobile impurity immersed in a three-dimensional Fermi sea of fermions at finite temperature, by using the standard non-self-consistent many-body TTT-matrix theory that is equivalent to a finite-temperature variational approach with the inclusion of one-particle-hole excitation. The impurity spectral function is determined in the real-frequency domain, avoiding any potential errors due to the numerical analytic continuation in previous TTT-matrix calculations and the small spectral broadening parameter used in variational calculations. In the weak-coupling limit, we find that the quasiparticle decay rate of both attractive and repulsive polarons does not increase significantly with increasing temperature, and therefore Fermi polarons may remain well defined far above Fermi degeneracy. In contrast, near the unitary limit with strong coupling, the decay rate of Fermi polarons rapidly increases and the quasiparticle picture breaks down close to the Fermi temperature. We analyze in detail the recent ejection and injection radio-frequency (rf) spectroscopy measurements, performed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and at the European Laboratory for Non-Linear Spectroscopy (LENS), respectively. We show that the momentum average of the spectral function, which is necessary to account for the observed rf spectroscopy, has a sizable contribution to the width of the quasiparticle peak in spectroscopy. As a result, the measured decay rate of Fermi polarons could be significantly larger than the calculated quasiparticle decay rate at zero momentum. By taking this crucial contribution into account, we find that there is a reasonable agreement between theory and experiment for the lifetime of Fermi polarons in the strong-coupling regime, as long as they remain well defined.
Abstract Using the variational method, we study the properties of a spin-down impurity immersed in a one-dimensional (1D) spin-up Fermi sea. With repulsive interactions between them, the impurity is dressed up by surrounding particles in Fermi sea and forms a polaron. We clearly calculate the binding energy, effective mass, momentum distribution, Tan contact, and pair correlation. Even in strong repulsive regimes, the results can agree with the exact Bethe Ansatz results. The repulsive polaron energy E + is below Fermi energy E F and no negative effective masses are found in whole interaction regimes, unequal masses polarons are also calculated. We show a clear momentum distribution and calculate the Tan contact from three different aspects. Furthermore, we explore the particle-hole excitation and find that the hole terms in Fermi sea have a great influence on the polaron energy and contact in repulsive regime. These results show that the variational method can still be used effectively in 1D repulsive polaron system .
A light impurity in a Fermi sea undergoes a transition from a polaron to a molecule for increasing interaction. We develop a method to compute the spectral functions of the polaron and molecule in a unified framework based on the functional renormalization group with full self-energy feedback. We discuss the energy spectra and decay widths of the attractive and repulsive polaron branches as well as the molecular bound state, and confirm the scaling of the excited-state decay rate near the transition. The quasiparticle weight of the polaron shifts from the attractive to the repulsive branch across the transition, while the molecular bound state has a very small residue characteristic for a composite particle. We propose an experimental procedure to measure the repulsive branch in a 6Li^{6}\mathrm{Li}6Li Fermi gas using rf spectroscopy and calculate the corresponding spectra.
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.