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arXiv:2604.23785 · Physical Review Research

Core-Hole Excitation Dynamics of One-Dimensional Ultracold Trapped Fermions

André Becker, Georgios M. Koutentakis, Peter Schmelcher

cond-mat.quant-gasquant-phSubmitted Apr 26, 2026• Announced Apr 28, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

We investigate the nonequilibrium dynamics of core-hole excitations in a one-dimensional fermionic few-body system consisting of a spin-polarized Fermi bath coupled to a single heavy mobile impurity. The bath is initially prepared in a particle-hole configuration by emptying a selected bath single-particle orbital, while the impurity is displaced with respect to the center of the bath confinement potential. The quench dynamics are initialized by suddenly switching on the impurity-bath interaction. To resolve the resulting dynamics, we combine two complementary \textit{ab initio} approaches, namely the Multi-Layer Multi-Configuration Time-Dependent Hartree method for mixtures and a multi-channel Born-Oppenheimer framework. We show that the postquench response is governed by the interaction strength, impurity confinement, mass imbalance, and the location of the initially prepared hole within the Fermi sea. The density evolution and impurity center-of-mass motion reveal a competition between mixing and demixing of impurity and bath, while the von Neumann entropy demonstrates the buildup of pronounced many-body correlations. Most importantly, the occupation dynamics of the initially emptied orbital identifies deep core holes as substantially more robust against refilling than bulk or edge vacancies. Our results establish core-hole excitations as robust dynamical many-body features in trapped ultracold fermions and provide a controlled route towards probing orthogonality response, correlation buildup, and hole refilling in real time.

Comments
18 pages, 9 figures

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We investigate the nonequilibrium dynamics of core-hole excitations in a one-dimensional fermionic few-body system consisting of a spin-polarized Fermi bath coupled to a single heavy mobile impurity. The bath is initially prepared in a particle-hole configuration by emptying a selected bath single-particle orbital, while the impurity is displaced with respect to the center of the bath confinement potential. The quench dynamics are initialized by suddenly switching on the impurity-bath interaction. To resolve the resulting dynamics, we combine two complementary \textit{ab initio} approaches, namely the Multi-Layer Multi-Configuration Time-Dependent Hartree method for mixtures and a multi-channel Born-Oppenheimer framework. We show that the postquench response is governed by the interaction strength, impurity confinement, mass imbalance, and the location of the initially prepared hole within the Fermi sea. The density evolution and impurity center-of-mass motion reveal a competition between mixing and demixing of impurity and bath, while the von Neumann entropy demonstrates the buildup of pronounced many-body correlations. Most importantly, the occupation dynamics of the initially emptied orbital identifies deep core holes as substantially more robust against refilling than bulk or edge vacancies. Our results establish core-hole excitations as robust dynamical many-body features in trapped ultracold fermions and provide a controlled route towards probing orthogonality response, correlation buildup, and hole refilling in real time.
We investigate the real-time dynamics of a quenched quantum impurity immersed in a one-dimensional ultracold Fermi gas, focusing on the breakdown of the adiabatic Born-Oppenheimer approximation due to nonadiabatic effects. Despite a sizable impurity-bath mass imbalance, increasing interactions induce strong nonadiabatic couplings, disrupting adiabatic motion and enabling population transfer between the adiabatic potential energy curves. These transitions are governed by conical intersections arising from the pseudo Jahn-Teller effect, dynamically shaping the impurity's motion through the bath. Using simulations via the multilayer multiconfiguration time-dependent Hartree method and a multichannel Born-Oppenheimer framework, we track the impurity's evolution and directly prove the dynamical manifestation of the pseudo Jahn-Teller effect. We analyze two key scenarios: (i) a small initial shift, where a single avoided crossing drives transitions, and (ii) a large shift, where multiple avoided crossings lead to enhanced nonadiabaticity, self-trapping, and energy redistribution. Our findings establish ultracold fermionic few-body systems as tunable platforms for studying nonadiabatic quantum dynamics, opening new avenues for controlled impurity transport in strongly correlated environments.
We theoretically investigate the correlated decoherence dynamics of two mobile impurities trapped within a gas of ultracold fermionic atoms. We use a mean-field approximation to self-consistently describe the effect of impurity-gas collisions on impurity motion, while decoherence of the impurities' internal state is computed exactly within a functional determinant approach. At equilibrium, we find that the impurities undergo bath-induced localization as the impurity-gas interaction strength is increased. We then study the nonequilibrium dynamics induced by a sudden change of the impurities' internal state, which can be experimentally probed by Ramsey interferometry. Our theoretical approach allows us to investigate the effect of impurity motion on decoherence dynamics, finding strong deviations from the universal behavior associated with Anderson's orthogonality catastrophe when the mass imbalance between impurity and gas atoms is small. Finally, we show that mobile impurities can be used as thermometers of their environment, and that bath-mediated correlations can be beneficial for thermometric performance at low temperatures, even in the presence of nontrivial impurity motion. Our results showcase the interesting open quantum dynamics of mobile impurities dephasing in a common environment, and they can help to provide more precise temperature estimates of ultracold fermionic mixtures.
We consider the dynamics of an impurity atom immersed in an ideal Fermi gas at zero temperature. We focus on the coherent quantum evolution of the impurity following a quench to strong impurity-fermion interactions, where the interactions are assumed to be short range like in cold-atom experiments. To approximately model the many-body time evolution, we use a truncated basis method, where at most two particle-hole excitations of the Fermi sea are included. When the system is initially noninteracting, we show that our method exactly captures the short-time dynamics following the quench, and we find that the overlap between initial and final states displays a universal nonanalytic dependence on time in this limit. We further demonstrate how our method can be used to compute the impurity spectral function, as well as describe many-body phenomena involving coupled impurity spin states, such as Rabi oscillations in a medium or highly engineered quantum quenches.
We investigate the nonequilibrium quantum dynamics of one and two heavy fermionic impurities being harmonically trapped and repulsively interacting with a finite ensemble of majority fermions. A quench of the potential of the majority species from a double-well to a harmonic trap is applied, enforcing its counterflow, which in turn perturbs the impurities. For weak repulsions, it is shown that the mixture undergoes a periodic mixing and demixing dynamics, while stronger interactions lead to a more pronounced dynamical spatial separation. In the presence of correlations, the impurity exhibits an expansion dynamics which is absent in the Hartree-Fock case, resulting in an enhanced degree of miscibility. We generalize our results to different impurity masses and demonstrate that the expansion amplitude of the impurity reduces for a larger mass. Furthermore, we showcase that the majority species is strongly correlated and a phase separation occurs on the two-body level. Most importantly, signatures of attractive impurity-impurity induced interactions mediated by the majority species are identified in the time evolution of the two-body correlations of the impurities, a result that is supported by inspecting their spatial size.
We unravel the ground-state properties and the nonequilibrium quantum dynamics of two bosonic impurities immersed in a one-dimensional fermionic environment by applying a quench of the impurity-medium interaction strength. In the ground state, the impurities and the Fermi sea are phase separated for strong impurity-medium repulsions while they experience a localization tendency around the trap center for large attractions. We demonstrate the presence of attractive induced interactions mediated by the host for impurity-medium couplings of either sign and analyze the competition between induced and direct interactions. A quench to repulsive interactions triggers a breathing motion in both components, with an interaction dependent frequency and amplitude for the impurities, and a dynamical phase separation between the impurities and their surrounding for strong repulsions. For attractive postquench couplings a beating pattern owing its existence to the dominant role of induced interactions takes place with both components showing a localization trend around the trap center. In both quench scenarios, attractive induced correlations are manifested between noninteracting impurities and are found to dominate the direct ones only for quenches to attractive couplings.
This work examines a mobile impurity interacting with a bath of a few spin- ↑ and spin- ↓ fermions in a small one-dimensional open lattice system. We study ground-state properties using the exact diagonalization method, where the system is modeled by a three-component Fermi Hubbard Hamiltonian. We find that in addition to the standard phase separation between a strongly repulsive impurity and the bath, a strongly attractive impurity also phase separates with the fermionic holes due to the particle-hole symmetry. Furthermore, we find that the impurity can show an oscillatory pattern in its density for intermediate attractive and repulsive bath-impurity interactions, which are induced by Friedel oscillations in the finite-size fermionic bath. This rich behavior of the impurity could be probed with fermionic ultracold mixtures in optical lattices.