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arXiv:2206.02317 · Physical Review A

Fermi spin polaron and dissipative Fermi-polaron Rabi dynamics

Hui Hu, Xia-Ji Liu

Published Dec 19, 2023• 6 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We consider a spin impurity with multiple energy levels moving in a noninteracting Fermi sea and theoretically solve this Fermi-spin-polaron problem at nonzero temperature by using a non-self-consistent many-body $T$-matrix theory. We focus on the simplest case with spin $\frac{1}{2}$, where the two energy states of the impurity are coupled by a Rabi flip term. At small Rabi coupling, the impurity exhibits damped Rabi oscillations, where the decoherence is caused by the interaction with the Fermi sea, as recently reported in Fermi-polaron experiments with ultracold atoms. We investigate the dependence of Rabi oscillations on the Rabi coupling strength and examine the additional nonlinear damping due to large Rabi coupling. At finite temperature and nonzero impurity concentration, the impurity can acquire a pronounced momentum distribution. We show that the momentum or thermal average can sizably reduce the visibility of Rabi oscillations. We compare our theoretical predictions to recent experimental data and find good agreement without any adjustable parameters.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.108.063312

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We consider a spin impurity with multiple energy levels moving in a noninteracting Fermi sea and theoretically solve this Fermi-spin-polaron problem at nonzero temperature by using a non-self-consistent many-body TTT-matrix theory. We focus on the simplest case with spin 12\frac{1}{2}21​, where the two energy states of the impurity are coupled by a Rabi flip term. At small Rabi coupling, the impurity exhibits damped Rabi oscillations, where the decoherence is caused by the interaction with the Fermi sea, as recently reported in Fermi-polaron experiments with ultracold atoms. We investigate the dependence of Rabi oscillations on the Rabi coupling strength and examine the additional nonlinear damping due to large Rabi coupling. At finite temperature and nonzero impurity concentration, the impurity can acquire a pronounced momentum distribution. We show that the momentum or thermal average can sizably reduce the visibility of Rabi oscillations. We compare our theoretical predictions to recent experimental data and find good agreement without any adjustable parameters.
We investigate the behavior of a mobile spin-1/2 impurity atom immersed in a Fermi gas, where the interacting spin-$\ensuremath{\uparrow}$ and noninteracting spin-$\ensuremath{\downarrow}$ states of the impurity are Rabi coupled via an external field. This scenario resembles the classic problem of a two-state system interacting with a dissipative environment, but with an added dimension provided by the impurity momentum degree of freedom. In this case, the impurity can become ``dressed'' by excitations of the Fermi sea to form a Fermi polaron quasiparticle. For the steady-state system, where the impurity has thermalized with the medium, we derive exact thermodynamic relations that connect the impurity magnetization with quasiparticle properties such as the number of fermions in the dressing cloud. We show how the thermodynamic properties evolve with increasing Rabi coupling and we present exact analytical results in the limits of weak and strong Rabi coupling. For the dynamics of the Rabi-driven Fermi polaron, we formulate a theoretical approach based on correlation functions that respects conservation laws and allows the efficient calculation of Rabi oscillations for a range of timescales and impurity momenta beyond what has been achieved previously. Our results are in good agreement with recent experiments on the Rabi oscillations of the attractive polaron, and they reveal how the Rabi oscillations are influenced by the interplay between the polaron and its dressing cloud.
Despite the paradigmatic nature of the Fermi-polaron model, the theoretical description of its nonlinear dynamics poses challenges. Here, we apply a quantum kinetic theory of driven polarons to recent experiments with ultracold atoms, where Rabi oscillations between a Fermi-polaron state and a noninteracting level were reported. The resulting equations separate decoherence from momentum relaxation, with the corresponding rates showing a different dependence on microscopic scattering processes and quasiparticle properties. We describe both the polaron ground state and the excited repulsive-polaron state and we find a good quantitative agreement between our predictions and the available experimental data without any fitting parameter. Our approach not only takes into account collisional phenomena, but also it can be used to study the different roles played by decoherence and the collisional integral in the strongly interacting highly imbalanced mixture of Fermi gases.
An extremely polarized mixture of an ultracold Fermi gas is expected to reduce to a Fermi polaron system, which consists of a single impurity immersed in the Fermi sea of majority atoms. By developing a many-body T -matrix theory, we investigate spectral properties of the polarized mixture in experimentally relevant regimes in which the system of finite impurity concentration at nonzero temperature is concerned. We explicitly demonstrate presence of polaron physics in the polarized limit and discuss effects of many polarons in an intermediate regime in a selfconsistent manner. By analyzing the spectral function at finite impurity concentration, we extract the attractive and repulsive polaron energies. We find that a renormalization of majority atoms via an interaction with minority atoms and a thermal depletion of the impurity chemical potential are of significance to depict the many-polaron regime.
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.
By using a non-self-consistent many-body TTT-matrix theory, we calculate the finite-temperature Raman spectroscopy of a mobile impurity immersed in a Fermi bath in three dimensions. The dependencies of the Raman spectrum on the transferred momentum, temperature, and impurity-bath interaction are discussed in detail. We confirm that the peak in the Raman spectrum shows a weaker dependence on the impurity concentration than that in the radio-frequency spectroscopy due to the nonzero transferred momentum, as anticipated. We compare our theoretical prediction with the recent measurement by Gal Ness et al. [G. Ness, C. Shkedrov, Y. Florshaim, O. K. Diessel, J. von Milczewski, R. Schmidt, and Y. Sagi, Phys. Rev. X 10, 041019 (2020)] without any adjustable parameters. At weak coupling, we find a good quantitative agreement. However, close to the Feshbach resonance the agreement becomes worse. At strong coupling, we find that an unrealistic Fermi bath temperature might be needed to account for the experimental data.
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.