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arXiv:2609.09129

Anderson orthogonality scaling in the Rabi-driven heavy Fermi polaron

Michael Rautenberg, Tobias Krom, Eugen Dizer, Olivier Bleu, Eleonora Lippi, Tilman Enss, Manfred Salmhofer, Lauriane Chomaz, Matthias Weidemüller

cond-mat.quant-gasquant-phSubmitted Sep 8, 2026• Announced Sep 9, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

The Anderson orthogonality catastrophe (AOC) is a paradigmatic many-body phenomenon in which a local perturbation induces a macroscopic response of a Fermi sea. We probe signatures of the AOC by coherently driving heavy Fermi polarons in an ultracold $^6$Li-$^{133}$Cs mixture. We observe a power-law dependence of the measured Rabi frequency on the drive strength, with exponents consistent with AOC predictions. Finite-temperature simulations quantitatively reproduce the observed scaling, indicating that AOC signatures persist beyond the idealized zero-temperature, infinite-mass limit. The damping of the Rabi oscillations provides access to polaron dephasing and reveals a nonmonotonic drive dependence, qualitatively consistent with current theories. Our results establish coherently driven impurities as a versatile probe of quantum many-body dynamics through local coherent control.

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The Anderson orthogonality catastrophe (AOC) is a paradigmatic many-body phenomenon in which a local perturbation induces a macroscopic response of a Fermi sea. We probe signatures of the AOC by coherently driving heavy Fermi polarons in an ultracold 6^66Li-133^{133}133Cs mixture. We observe a power-law dependence of the measured Rabi frequency on the drive strength, with exponents consistent with AOC predictions. Finite-temperature simulations quantitatively reproduce the observed scaling, indicating that AOC signatures persist beyond the idealized zero-temperature, infinite-mass limit. The damping of the Rabi oscillations provides access to polaron dephasing and reveals a nonmonotonic drive dependence, qualitatively consistent with current theories. Our results establish coherently driven impurities as a versatile probe of quantum many-body dynamics through local coherent control.
We consider a fixed impurity immersed in a Fermi gas at arbitrary temperature. We take the impurity to have two internal spin states where the $\ensuremath{\uparrow}$ state is assumed to interact with the medium such that it exhibits the orthogonality catastrophe, whereas the $\ensuremath{\downarrow}$ state is a bare noninteracting particle. Introducing a Rabi coupling between the impurity states, therefore, allows us to investigate the coupling between a discrete spectral peak and the Fermi-edge singularity, i.e., between states with and without a quasiparticle residue. Combining an exact treatment of the uncoupled impurity Green's functions with a variational approach to treat the Rabi driven dynamics, we find that the system features Rabi oscillations whose frequency scales as a nontrivial power of the Rabi drive at low temperatures. This reflects the power law of the Fermi-edge singularity and, importantly, this behavior is qualitatively different from the case of a mobile impurity quasiparticle where the scaling is linear. We, therefore, argue that the scaling law serves as an experimentally implementable probe of the orthogonality catastrophe. We additionally simulate rf spectroscopy beyond linear response, finding a remarkable agreement with an experiment using heavy impurities [Kohstall et al., Nature 485, 615 (2012)], thus, demonstrating the power of our approach.
In this report we discuss the dynamical response of heavy quantum impurities immersed in a Fermi gas at zero and at finite temperature. Studying both the frequency and the time domain allows one to identify interaction regimes that are characterized by distinct many-body dynamics. From this theoretical study a picture emerges in which impurity dynamics is universal on essentially all time scales, and where the high-frequency few-body response is related to the long-time dynamics of the Anderson orthogonality catastrophe by Tan relations. Our theoretical description relies on different and complementary approaches: functional determinants give an exact numerical solution for time- and frequency-resolved responses, bosonization provides accurate analytical expressions at low temperatures, and the theory of Toeplitz determinants allows one to analytically predict response up to high temperatures. Using these approaches we predict the thermal decoherence rate of the fermionic system and prove that within the considered model the fastest rate of long-time decoherence is given by [Formula: see text]. We show that Feshbach resonances in cold atomic systems give access to new interaction regimes where quantum effects can prevail even in the thermal regime of many-body dynamics. The key signature of this phenomenon is a crossover between different exponential decay rates of the real-time Ramsey signal. It is shown that the physics of the orthogonality catastrophe is experimentally observable up to temperatures [Formula: see text] where it leaves its fingerprint in a power-law temperature dependence of thermal spectral weight and we review how this phenomenon is related to the physics of heavy ions in liquid [Formula: see text]He and the formation of Fermi polarons. The presented results are in excellent agreement with recent experiments on LiK mixtures, and we predict several new phenomena that can be tested using currently available experimental technology.
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.
The Fermi-edge singularity and the Anderson orthogonality catastrophe describe the universal physics which occurs when a Fermi sea is locally quenched by the sudden switching of a scattering potential, leading to a brutal disturbance of its ground state. We demonstrate that the effect can be seen in the controllable domain of ultracold trapped gases by providing an analytic description of the out-of-equilibrium response to an atomic impurity, both at zero and at finite temperature. Furthermore, we link the transient behavior of the gas to the decoherence of the impurity, and to the degree of the non-Markovian nature of its dynamics.
Quasiparticles are emergent excitations of matter that underlie much of our understanding of quantum many-body systems. Therefore, the prospect of controlling their properties has both fundamental and practical implications. However, in solid-state materials, it is often challenging to understand how quasiparticles are modified by external fields due to their complex interplay with other collective excitations. Here we demonstrate the manipulation of Fermi polarons—quasiparticles formed by impurities interacting with a Fermi gas—in a homogeneous atomic gas using fast radio-frequency control. Exploiting two internal states of the impurity species, we develop a steady-state spectroscopy, from which we extract the energy of the driven polaron. By varying the drive Rabi frequency, we measure the decay rate and the quasiparticle residue of the polaron in the weak-drive limit. At large Rabi frequencies, we observe signs that the drive causes a hybridization of the driven polaron with an incoherent background, leading to the breakdown of a description in terms of textbook quasiparticles. Our experiment establishes the driven Fermi polaron as a promising platform for studying controllable quasiparticles in strongly driven quantum matter and calls for a controlled theoretical framework to describe the dynamics of this strongly interacting quantum system. Fermi polarons are quasiparticles formed by impurities immersed in a Fermi gas. An experiment in an ultracold fermionic gas now shows how to control their properties with a tunable radio-frequency field.
Measurement perturbs a quantum system by coupling it to external degrees of freedom, but detector backaction depends on the physical mechanism of measurement itself. In solid-state devices, detectors driven far from equilibrium to enable faster measurements produce backaction that can often be understood as classical noise. However, a strong measurement can also induce backaction from quantum many-body correlations in the detector that are intrinsic to the measurement, even without shot noise. Here, we probe this near-equilibrium backaction through the effect of a quantum-dot charge sensor on tunnelling between a second quantum dot and its reservoirs. The measurement realizes the Anderson Orthogonality Catastrophe (AOC): electrons in the detector leads reorganize in response to an abrupt change in local scattering potential, suppressing resonant tunnelling while enabling inelastic processes that exchange energy with the detector. Changing the detector energy level tunes the AOC backaction from negligible to dominant in the tunnelling dynamics. More broadly, these results establish detector-induced many-body correlations as a controllable influence on quantum dynamics.