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arXiv:2201.02453 · Physical Review A

Mobile impurity probing a two-dimensional superfluid phase transition

Ragheed Alhyder, Georg M. Bruun

Published Jun 3, 2022• 10 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The use of atomically sized quantum systems as highly sensitive measuring devices represents an exciting and quickly growing research field. Here we explore the properties of a quasiparticle formed by a mobile impurity interacting with a two-dimensional fermionic superfluid. The energy of the quasiparticle is shown to be lowered by superfluid pairing, as this increases the compressibility of the Fermi gas, thereby making it easier for the impurity to perturb its surroundings. We demonstrate that the fundamentally discontinuous nature of the superfluid-to-normal phase transition of a two-dimensional system leads to a rapid increase in the quasiparticle energy around the critical temperature. The magnitude of this increase exhibits a nonmonotonic behavior as a function of the pairing strength with a sizable maximum in the crossover region, where the spatial extend of the Cooper pairs is comparable to the interparticle spacing. Since the quasiparticle energy is measurable with present experimental techniques, our results illustrate how impurities entangled with their environment can serve as useful probes for nontrivial thermal and quantum correlations.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.105.063303

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The use of atomically sized quantum systems as highly sensitive measuring devices represents an exciting and quickly growing research field. Here we explore the properties of a quasiparticle formed by a mobile impurity interacting with a two-dimensional fermionic superfluid. The energy of the quasiparticle is shown to be lowered by superfluid pairing, as this increases the compressibility of the Fermi gas, thereby making it easier for the impurity to perturb its surroundings. We demonstrate that the fundamentally discontinuous nature of the superfluid-to-normal phase transition of a two-dimensional system leads to a rapid increase in the quasiparticle energy around the critical temperature. The magnitude of this increase exhibits a nonmonotonic behavior as a function of the pairing strength with a sizable maximum in the crossover region, where the spatial extend of the Cooper pairs is comparable to the interparticle spacing. Since the quasiparticle energy is measurable with present experimental techniques, our results illustrate how impurities entangled with their environment can serve as useful probes for nontrivial thermal and quantum correlations.
We study polaron excitations induced by an impurity interacting with a two-dimensional p+ipp+ipp+ip Fermi superfluid. As the Fermi-Fermi pairing interaction is tuned, the background Fermi superfluid undergoes a topological phase transition. We show that such a transition is accompanied by a discontinuity in the second derivative of the polaron energy, regardless of the impurity-fermion interaction. We also identify a polaron to trimer crossover when the Fermi superfluid is in the strongly interacting, thus topologically trivial, regime. However, the trimer state is metastable against the molecular state where the impurity binds a Bogoliubov quasiparticle from the Fermi superfluid. By comparing the polaron to molecule transition in our system with that of an impurity in a noninteracting Fermi sea, we find that pairing interactions in the background Fermi superfluid effectively facilitate the impurity-fermion binding. Our results suggest the possibility of using the impurity as a probe for detecting topological phase transitions in the background; they also reveal interesting competitions between various many-body states in the system.
The nature of the normal phase of strongly correlated fermionic systems is an outstanding question in quantum many-body physics. We used spatially resolved radio-frequency spectroscopy to measure pairing energy of fermions across a wide range of temperatures and interaction strengths in a two-dimensional gas of ultracold fermionic atoms. We observed many-body pairing at temperatures far above the critical temperature for superfluidity. In the strongly interacting regime, the pairing energy in the normal phase considerably exceeds the intrinsic two-body binding energy of the system and shows a clear dependence on local density. This implies that pairing in this regime is driven by many-body correlations, rather than two-body physics. Our findings show that pairing correlations in strongly interacting two-dimensional fermionic systems are remarkably robust against thermal fluctuations.
We investigate the zero-temperature quasiparticle properties of a mobile impurity immersed in a strongly interacting Fermi superfluid at the crossover from a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) to a Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superfluid, by using a many-body TTT-matrix approach that excludes Efimov trimer bound states. Termed the BEC-BCS crossover polaron, or crossover polaron in short, this quasiparticle couples to elementary excitations of a many-body background and therefore could provide a useful probe of the underlying strongly interacting Fermi superfluid. Due to the existence of a significant pairing gap $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}$, we find that the repulsive polaron branch becomes less well defined. In contrast, the attractive polaron branch is protected by the pairing gap and becomes more robust at finite momentum. It remains as a delta-function peak in the impurity spectral function below a threshold $2\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}$. Above the threshold, the attractive polaron enters the particle-hole continuum and starts to get damped. We predict the polaron energy, residue, and effective mass for realistic Bose-Fermi mixtures, where the minority bosonic atoms play the role of impurity. These results are practically useful for future cold-atom experiments on crossover polarons.
We study the physics of a mobile impurity confined in a two-dimensional lattice, moving within a Bose-Hubbard bath at zero temperature. Exploiting the quantum Gutzwiller formalism, we develop a beyond-Fröhlich model of the bath-impurity interaction to describe the properties of the polaronic quasiparticle formed by the dressing of the impurity by quantum fluctuations of the bath. We find a stable and well-defined polaron throughout the entire phase diagram of the bath, except for the very low tunneling limit of the hard-core superfluid. The polaron properties are highly sensitive to the different universality classes of the quantum phase transition between the superfluid and Mott insulating phases, providing an unambiguous probe of correlations and collective modes in a quantum critical many-body environment.
Continuous quantum phase transitions are characterized by an order parameter and correlation functions that are often challenging to access experimentally or in direct numerical simulations. The energy of an added impurity can on the other hand be probed by established polaron spectroscopy, or numerically with Monte Carlo methods. We provide evidence from ground-state quantum Monte Carlo calculations that the energy of a mobile impurity interacting weakly with a surrounding lattice Bose gas provides access to the critical behavior of the Mott insulator-superfluid phase transition. Finite-size scaling of the energy reveals that its value is scale invariant at the critical point of the quantum phase transition, and we extract a scaling exponent that is currently unexplained by theory. For a small lattice we further observe a flattening of the impurity-boson density-density correlations at the critical point, which hints at a divergence of a corresponding length scale in the thermodynamic limit. Our results suggest that impurity spectroscopy represents a useful way to probe the critical properties of quantum phase transitions in general.
This paper addresses the transition from the normal to the superfluid state in strongly correlated two dimensional fermionic superconductors and Fermi gases. We arrive at the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) temperature TBKTT_{\text{BKT}}TBKT​ as a function of \emph{attractive} pairing strength by associating it with the onset of quasi-condensation in the normal phase. Our approach builds on a criterion for determining the BKT transition temperature for atomic gases which is based on a well established Quantum Monte Carlo analysis of the phase space density. This latter quantity, when derived from BCS-BEC crossover theory for fermions, leads to non-monotonic behavior for TBKTT_{\text{BKT}}TBKT​ as a function of the attractive interaction or inverse scattering length. In Fermi gases, this implies a robust superconducting dome followed by a long tail from the flat BEC asymptote, rather similar to what is observed experimentally. For lattice systems we find that TBKTT_{\text{BKT}}TBKT​ has an absolute maximum of the order of 0.1EF0.1 E_F0.1EF​. We discuss how our results compare with those derived from the Nelson Kosterlitz criterion based on the mean field superfluid density and the approach to the transition from below. While there is agreement in the strict mean-field BCS regime at weak coupling, we find that at moderate pairing strength bosonic excitations cause a substantial increase in TBKTT_\text{BKT}TBKT​ followed by an often dramatic decrease before the system enters the BEC regime.