The state of particles injected onto the surface of the Fermi sea depends essentially on the temperature. The pure state injected at zero temperature becomes a mixed state if injected at finite temperature. Moreover the electron source injecting a single-particle state at zero temperature may excite a multi-particle state if the Fermi sea is at finite temperature. Here I unveil a symmetry of the scattering amplitude of a source, which is sufficient to preserve a single-particle emission regime at finite temperatures if such a regime is achieved at zero temperature. I give an example and analyze the effect of temperature on time-dependent electrical and heat currents carried by a single-particle excitation.
The state of a single particle injected onto the surface of the Fermi sea is a pure state if the temperature is zero and is a mixed state if the temperature is finite. Moreover, the state of an injected particle is orthogonal to the state of the Fermi sea at zero temperature, while it is not orthogonal at nonzero temperature. These changes in the quantum state of the injected particles can be detected using the temperature dependence of the shot noise that is generated when the particles one by one pass through a semitransparent quantum point contact. Namely, the shot noise produced by the mixed state is suppressed in comparison with the noise of the pure state. In addition, the correlations between the injected particles and the underlying Fermi sea, present at nonzero temperature, do enhance the shot noise. Furthermore, antibunching of injected particles with possible thermal excitations coming from another input channel of a quantum point contact does suppress shot noise. Here I analyze in detail these three effects, which are responsible for the temperature dependence of the shot noise, and discuss how to distinguish them experimentally.
The state of electrons injected onto the surface of the Fermi sea depends on temperature. The state is pure at zero temperature and is mixed at finite temperature. In the case of a single-electron injection, such a transformation can be detected as a decrease in shot noise with increasing temperature. In the case of a multielectron injection, the situation is subtler. The mixedness helps the development of quantum-mechanical exchange correlations between injected electrons, even if such correlations are absent at zero temperature. These correlations enhance the shot noise, which in part counteracts the reduction of noise with temperature. Moreover, at sufficiently high temperatures, the correlation contribution to noise predominates over the contribution of individual particles. As a result, in the system of
N electrons, the apparent charge (which is revealed via the shot noise) is changed from
e at zero temperature to
Ne at high temperatures. It looks like the exchange correlations glue electrons into one particle of total charge and energy. This point of view is supported by both charge noise and heat noise. Interestingly, in the macroscopic limit, $N\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ensuremath{\infty}$, the correlation contribution completely suppresses the effect of temperature on noise.
The single-particle state is not expected to demonstrate second-order coherence. Here I analyze the injection of electrons into a conductor and show that, at a nonzero temperature, the underlying Fermi sea causes the single-particle injected state to exhibit second-order coherence. For this purpose, I calculate the second-order correlation function,
G(2), of electrons injected on top of the Fermi sea. At zero temperature, the function
G(2) unambiguously demonstrates whether the injected state is a single- or a multiparticle state:
G(2) vanishes in the former case, while it does not vanish in the latter case. However, at nonzero temperatures, when the injected state is a mixed state, a purely single-particle contribution makes the function
G(2) nonvanishing even in the case of injection of one electron. The single-particle contribution puts the lower limit on the second-order correlation function and thereby limits its use as a single-particle injection test at nonzero temperatures. The existence of a single-particle contribution to
G(2) can be verified experimentally by measuring the cross-correlation electrical noise.
At finite temperatures, the sharp distinction between occupied and unoccupied states near the Fermi surface becomes blurred, as the filling of the states is ruled by the Fermi distribution. This leads to significant changes in the physical properties of the system. Analyzing these effects is crucial for understanding phenomena like electrical and thermal conductivity, as well as the response of materials to external perturbations. Moreover, working at nonzero temperatures allows us to study transitions between quantum and classical regimes, shedding light on the statistical mechanics that govern systems from condensed matter to nuclear physics and astrophysics.
We present a systematic study of a mobile impurity immersed in a three-dimensional Fermi sea of fermions at finite temperature, by using the standard non-self-consistent many-body
T-matrix theory that is equivalent to a finite-temperature variational approach with the inclusion of one-particle-hole excitation. The impurity spectral function is determined in the real-frequency domain, avoiding any potential errors due to the numerical analytic continuation in previous
T-matrix calculations and the small spectral broadening parameter used in variational calculations. In the weak-coupling limit, we find that the quasiparticle decay rate of both attractive and repulsive polarons does not increase significantly with increasing temperature, and therefore Fermi polarons may remain well defined far above Fermi degeneracy. In contrast, near the unitary limit with strong coupling, the decay rate of Fermi polarons rapidly increases and the quasiparticle picture breaks down close to the Fermi temperature. We analyze in detail the recent ejection and injection radio-frequency (rf) spectroscopy measurements, performed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and at the European Laboratory for Non-Linear Spectroscopy (LENS), respectively. We show that the momentum average of the spectral function, which is necessary to account for the observed rf spectroscopy, has a sizable contribution to the width of the quasiparticle peak in spectroscopy. As a result, the measured decay rate of Fermi polarons could be significantly larger than the calculated quasiparticle decay rate at zero momentum. By taking this crucial contribution into account, we find that there is a reasonable agreement between theory and experiment for the lifetime of Fermi polarons in the strong-coupling regime, as long as they remain well defined.