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arXiv:1702.05097 · New Journal of Physics

Mobile spin impurity in an optical lattice

C W Duncan, F F Bellotti, Patrik Öhberg, Nikolaj Thomas Zinner, Manuel Valiente

Published Jul 10, 2017• 6 citations
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Abstract

We investigate the Fermi polaron problem in a spin-1/2 Fermi gas in an optical lattice for the limit of both strong repulsive contact interactions and one dimension. In this limit, a polaronic-like behaviour is not expected, and the physics is that of a magnon or impurity. While the charge degrees of freedom of the system are frozen, the resulting tight-binding Hamiltonian for the impurity's spin exhibits an intriguing structure that strongly depends on the filling factor of the lattice potential. This filling dependency also transfers to the nature of the interactions for the case of two magnons and the important spin balanced case. At low filling, and up until near unit filling, the single impurity Hamiltonian faithfully reproduces a single-band, quasi-homogeneous tight-binding problem. As the filling is increased and the second band of the single particle spectrum of the periodic potential is progressively filled, the impurity Hamiltonian, at low energies, describes a single particle trapped in a multi-well potential. Interestingly, once the first two bands are fully filled, the impurity Hamiltonian is a near-perfect realisation of the Su–Schrieffer–Heeger model. Our studies, which go well beyond the single-band approximation, that is, the Hubbard model, pave the way for the realisation of interacting one-dimensional models of condensed matter physics.

DOI
10.1088/1367-2630/aa753e

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We investigate the Fermi polaron problem in a spin-1/2 Fermi gas in an optical lattice for the limit of both strong repulsive contact interactions and one dimension. In this limit, a polaronic-like behaviour is not expected, and the physics is that of a magnon or impurity. While the charge degrees of freedom of the system are frozen, the resulting tight-binding Hamiltonian for the impurity's spin exhibits an intriguing structure that strongly depends on the filling factor of the lattice potential. This filling dependency also transfers to the nature of the interactions for the case of two magnons and the important spin balanced case. At low filling, and up until near unit filling, the single impurity Hamiltonian faithfully reproduces a single-band, quasi-homogeneous tight-binding problem. As the filling is increased and the second band of the single particle spectrum of the periodic potential is progressively filled, the impurity Hamiltonian, at low energies, describes a single particle trapped in a multi-well potential. Interestingly, once the first two bands are fully filled, the impurity Hamiltonian is a near-perfect realisation of the Su–Schrieffer–Heeger model. Our studies, which go well beyond the single-band approximation, that is, the Hubbard model, pave the way for the realisation of interacting one-dimensional models of condensed matter physics.
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Using continuous-space quantum Monte Carlo methods, we investigate the zero-temperature ferromagnetic behavior of a two-component repulsive Fermi gas under the influence of periodic potentials that describe the effect of a simple-cubic optical lattice. Simulations are performed with balanced and with imbalanced components, including the case of a single impurity immersed in a polarized Fermi sea (repulsive polaron). For an intermediate density below half filling, we locate the transitions between the paramagnetic, and the partially and fully ferromagnetic phases. As the intensity of the optical lattice increases, the ferromagnetic instability takes place at weaker interactions, indicating a possible route to observe ferromagnetism in experiments performed with ultracold atoms. We compare our findings with previous predictions based on the standard computational method used in material science, namely density functional theory, and with results based on tight-binding models.
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Abstract By using the exact Bethe wavefunctions of the one-dimensional Hubbard model with N spin-up fermions and one spin-down impurity, we derive an analytic expression of the impurity form factor, in the form of a determinant of a (N+1)(N+1)(N+1) ( N + 1 ) by (N+1)(N+1)(N+1) ( N + 1 ) matrix. This analytic expression enables us to exactly calculate spectral properties of one-dimensional Fermi polarons in lattices, when the masses of the impurity particle and the Fermi bath are equal. We present the impurity spectral function as functions of the on-site interaction strength and the filling factor of the Fermi bath, and discuss the origin of Fermi singularities in the spectral function at small momentum and the emergence of polaron quasiparticles at large momentum near the boundary of Brillouin zone. Our analytic expression of the impurity form factors pave the way to exploring the intriguing dynamics of a particle interacting with a Fermi bath. Our exact predictions on the impurity spectral function could be directly examined in cold-atom laboratories by using the radio-frequency spectroscopy and Ramsey spectroscopy.
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.
We consider the Fermi polaron problem of an impurity hopping around a two-dimensional square lattice and interacting with a sea of fermions at given filling factor. When the interaction is attractive, we find standard Fermi polaron quasiparticles, categorized as attractive polarons and repulsive polarons. When the interaction becomes repulsive, interestingly, we observe an unconventional highly excited polaron quasiparticle, sharply peaked at the corner of the first Brillouin zone with momentum $\mathbf{k}=(\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}\ensuremath{\pi},\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}\ensuremath{\pi})$. This super Fermi polaron branch arises from the dressing of the impurity's motion with holes, instead of particles of fermions. We show that super Fermi polarons become increasingly well defined with increasing impurity-fermion repulsions and might be considered as a precursor of Nagaoka ferromagnetism, which would appear at sufficiently large repulsions and at large filling factors. We also investigate the temperature dependence of super Fermi polarons and find that they are thermally robust against the significant increase in temperature.