arXiv:2509.04934

Downfolding a quantum many-body system: the quasi-1D Fermi polaron

L. Barisic, Giuliano Orso, Frédéric Chevy, Kris Van Houcke

Published Sep 5, 2025• 0 citations

Abstract

We investigate the properties of an impurity immersed in an ensemble of spin-polarized fermions confined in a tight quantum wire. We use a non-perturbative variational approach that accounts for virtual transverse excitations and regularizes the zero-range interaction. We compute the polaron's energy, effective mass, and spectral weight, and benchmark our results against the exactly solvable Yang-Gaudin model of a purely 1D system. While the two models agree in the weakly interacting regime, we find significant deviations in the strongly attractive limit, including a divergence of the effective mass and evidence for a polaron-to-molecule transition inherited from the underlying 3D physics, which is absent in the purely 1D description. Our work quantifies the accuracy of quasi-1D systems as analog quantum simulators and highlights the emergence of beyond-1D physics even in nominally 1D settings.

DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2509.04934

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