Abstract Polaron, a typical quasi-particle that describes a single impurity dressed with surrounding environment, serves as an ideal platform for bridging few- and many-body physics. In particular, different few-body correlations can compete with each other and lead to many intriguing phenomena. In this work, we review the recent progresses made in understanding few-body correlation effects in attractive Fermi polarons of ultracold gases. By adopting a unified variational ansatz that incorporates different few-body correlations in a single framework, we will discuss their competing effects in Fermi polarons when the impurity and majority fermions have the same or different masses. For the equal-mass case, we review the nature of polaron-molecule transition that is driven by two-body correlations, and especially highlight the finite momentum character and huge degeneracy of molecule states. For the mass-imbalanced case, we focus on the smooth crossover between polaron and various dressed clusters that originate from high-order correlations. These competing few-body correlations reviewed in Fermi polarons suggest a variety of exotic new phases in the corresponding many-body system of Fermi-Fermi mixtures.
Abstract Polaron, a typical quasi-particle that describes a single impurity dressed with surrounding environment, serves as an ideal platform for bridging few- and many-body physics. In particular, different few-body correlations can compete with each other and lead to many intriguing phenomena. In this work, we review the recent progresses made in understanding few-body correlation effects in attractive Fermi polarons of ultracold gases. By adopting a unified variational ansatz that incorporates different few-body correlations in a single framework, we will discuss their competing effects in Fermi polarons when the impurity and majority fermions have the same or different masses. For the equal-mass case, we review the nature of polaron-molecule transition that is driven by two-body correlations, and especially highlight the finite momentum character and huge degeneracy of molecule states. For the mass-imbalanced case, we focus on the smooth crossover between polaron and various dressed clusters that originate from high-order correlations. These competing few-body correlations reviewed in Fermi polarons suggest a variety of exotic new phases in the corresponding many-body system of Fermi-Fermi mixtures.
Polarons can serve as an ideal platform to identify few-body correlations in tackling complex many-body problems. In this work, we reveal various crystalline few-body correlations smoothly emergent from the mass-imbalanced Fermi polarons in two dimensions. A unified variational approach up to three particle-hole excitations allows us to extract the dominant dimer, trimer, or tetramer correlation in a single framework. When the fermion-impurity mass ratio is beyond certain critical value, the Fermi polaron is found to undergo a smooth crossover, instead of a sharp transition, from the polaronic to trimer and tetramer regimes as the fermion-impurity attraction is increased. The emergent trimer and tetramer correlations result in the momentum-space crystallization of particle-hole excitations featuring a stable diagonal or triangular structure, as can be directly probed through the density-density correlation of majority fermions. Our results shed light on the intriguing quantum phases in the mass-imbalanced Fermi-Fermi mixtures beyond the pairing superfluid paradigm.
Polaron quasiparticles are formed when a mobile impurity is coupled to the elementary excitations of a many-particle background. In the field of ultracold atoms, the study of the associated impurity problem has attracted a growing interest over the last fifteen years. Polaron quasiparticle properties are essential to our understanding of a variety of paradigmatic quantum many-body systems realized in ultracold atomic gases and in the solid state, from imbalanced Bose–Fermi and Fermi–Fermi mixtures to fermionic Hubbard models. In this topical review, we focus on the so-called repulsive polaron branch, which emerges as an excited many-body state in systems with underlying attractive interactions such as ultracold atomic mixtures, and is characterized by an effective repulsion between the impurity and the surrounding medium. We give a brief account of the current theoretical and experimental understanding of repulsive polaron properties, for impurities embedded in both fermionic and bosonic media, and we highlight open issues deserving future investigations.
It has been commonly believed that a polaron-to-molecule transition occurs in three-dimensional (3D) and 2D Fermi polaron systems as the attraction between the single impurity and majority fermions gets stronger. The conclusion has been drawn from the separate treatment of polaron and molecule states and thus deserves a close reexamination. In this work, we explore the physics of polarons and molecules by utilizing a unified variational Ansatz with up to two particle-hole (ph) excitations (V-2ph). We confirm the existence of a first-order transition in 3D and 2D Fermi polarons, and we show that the nature of such a transition lies in an energy competition between systems with different momenta, $\mathbf{Q}=\mathbit{0}$ and ∣Q∣=kF; here Q is defined as the momentum of a Fermi polaron system with respect to the Fermi sea of majority fermions (with Fermi momentum kF). The literally proposed molecule Ansatz is identified as an asymptotic limit of the ∣Q∣=kF state in a strong-coupling regime, which implies a huge SO(3) (for 3D) or SO(2) (for 2D) ground-state degeneracy in this regime. The recognition of such degeneracy is crucially important for evaluating the molecule occupation in realistic systems with finite impurity density and at finite temperature. To compare with recent experiment of 3D Fermi polarons, we have calculated various physical quantities under the V-2ph framework, and we obtained results that are in good agreement with experimental data in the weak-coupling and near-resonance regime. Further, to check the validity of our conclusion in 2D, we have adopted a different variational method based on the Gaussian sample of high-order ph excitations (V-Gph), and we found the same conclusion on the nature of the polaron-molecule transition therein. For a 1D system, the V-2ph method predicts no sharp transition, and the ground state is always at the $\mathbf{Q}=\mathbit{0}$ sector, consistent with the exact Bethe-Ansatz solution. The presence/absence of a polaron-molecule transition is analyzed to be closely related to the interplay effect of Pauli-blocking and ph excitations in different dimensions.
In this review, we discuss the properties of a few impurity atoms immersed in a gas of ultracold fermions--the so-called Fermi polaron problem. On one hand, this many-body system is appealing because it can be described almost exactly with simple diagrammatic and/or variational theoretical approaches. On the other, it provides a quantitatively reliable insight into the phase diagram of strongly interacting population-imbalanced quantum mixtures. In particular, we show that the polaron problem can be applied to the study of itinerant ferromagnetism, a long-standing problem in quantum mechanics.
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.
In this work we provide a comprehensive review of theoretical and experimental studies of the properties of polarons formed by mobile impurities strongly interacting with quantum many-body systems. We present a unified perspective on the universal concepts and theoretical techniques used to characterize polarons in two distinct platforms, ultracold atomic gases and atomically-thin transition metal dichalcogenides, which are linked by many deep parallels. We review polarons in both fermionic and bosonic environments, highlighting their similarities and differences including the intricate interplay between few- and many-body physics. Various kinds of polarons with long-range interactions or in magnetic backgrounds are discussed, and the theoretical and experimental progress towards understanding interactions between polarons is described. We outline how polaron physics, regarded as the low density limit of quantum mixtures, provides fundamental insights regarding the phase diagram of complex condensed matter systems. Furthermore, we describe how polarons may serve as quantum sensors of many-body physics in complex environments. Our work highlights the open problems, identifies new research directions and provides a comprehensive framework for this rapidly evolving research field.