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SciPost Physics

A systematic interpolatory method for an impurity in a one-dimensional fermionic background

Erik Jonathan Lindgren, R. E. Barfknecht, Nikolaj Thomas Zinner

Published Jul 13, 2020• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We explore a new numerical method for studying one-dimensional quantum systems in a trapping potential. We focus on the setup of an impurity in a fermionic background, where a single distinguishable particle interacts through a contact potential with a number of identical fermions. We can accurately describe this system, for various particle numbers, different trapping potentials and arbitrary finite repulsion, by constructing a truncated basis containing states at both zero and infinite repulsion. The results are compared with matrix product states methods and with the analytical result for two particles in a harmonic well.

DOI
10.21468/scipostphys.9.1.005

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We explore a new numerical method for studying one-dimensional quantum systems in a trapping potential. We focus on the setup of an impurity in a fermionic background, where a single distinguishable particle interacts through a contact potential with a number of identical fermions. We can accurately describe this system, for various particle numbers, different trapping potentials and arbitrary finite repulsion, by constructing a truncated basis containing states at both zero and infinite repulsion. The results are compared with matrix product states methods and with the analytical result for two particles in a harmonic well.
We explore a new variational principle for studying one-dimensional quantum systems in a trapping potential. We focus on the Fermi polaron problem, where a single distinguishable impurity interacts through a contact potential with a background of identical fermions. We can accurately describe this system at arbitrary finite repulsion by constructing a truncated basis containing states at both the limits of zero and infinite repulsion. We show how to construct this basis and how to obtain energies, density matrices and correlation functions, and provide results both for a harmonic well and a double well for various particle numbers. The results are compared both with matrix product states methods and with the analytical result for two particles in a harmonic well.
The transition from ``few to many'' has recently been probed experimentally in an ultracold harmonically confined one-dimensional lithium gas, in which a single impurity atom interacts with a background gas consisting of one, two, or more identical fermions [A. N. Wenz et al., Science 342, 457 (2013)]. For repulsive interactions between the background or majority atoms and the impurity, the interaction energy for relatively moderate system sizes was analyzed and found to converge toward the corresponding expression for an infinitely large Fermi gas. Motivated by these experimental results, we apply perturbative techniques to determine the interaction energy for weak and strong coupling strengths and derive approximate descriptions for the interaction energy for repulsive interactions with varying strength between the impurity and the majority atoms and any number of majority atoms.
We explore a few-fermion mixture consisting of two components that are repulsively interacting and confined in a one-dimensional harmonic trap. Different scenarios of population imbalance ranging from the completely imbalanced case where the physics of a single impurity in the Fermi sea is discussed to the partially imbalanced and equal population configurations are investigated. For the numerical calculations the multiconfigurational time-dependent Hartree method is employed, extending its application to few-fermion systems. Apart from numerical calculations we generalize our ansatz for a correlated pair wave function proposed recently [I. Brouzos and P. Schmelcher, Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 045301 (2012)] for bosons to mixtures of fermions. From weak to strong coupling between the components the energies, the densities and the correlation properties of one-dimensional systems change vastly with an upper limit set by fermionization where for infinite repulsion all fermions can be mapped to identical ones. The numerical and analytical treatments are in good agreement with respect to the description of this crossover. We show that for equal populations each pair of different component atoms splits into two single peaks in the density while for partial imbalance additional peaks and plateaus arise for very strong interaction strengths. The case of a single-impurity atom shows rich behavior of the energy and density as we approach fermionization and is directly connected to recent experiments [G. Z\"urn et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 075303 (2012)].
We provide an analytically tractable toy model of an infinitely heavy impurity interacting with the spin-polarized gas of bath fermions via a contact potential in 1D and placed in a harmonic trap. The solution to this problem requires knowledge of the single-particle fermionic eigenstates in the presence of a harmonic trap and a contact potential. We show how the spectrum can be understood from a perturbative solution of the exact transcendental equation in the weak and strong-coupling regimes. We additionally provide expressions for normalized wavefunctions and different overlaps between the states in the presence and absence of the impurity. Using these exact results, we analyze the energy of the polaron, derive Tan's contact-like relation for the density at the center of the harmonic trap, and compute the quasiparticle residue.
A one-dimensional world is very unusual as there is an interplay between quantum statistics and geometry, and a strong short-range repulsion between atoms mimics Fermi exclusion principle, fermionizing the system. Instead, a system with a large number of components with a single atom in each, on the opposite acquires many bosonic properties. We study the ground-state properties of a multicomponent repulsive Fermi gas trapped in a harmonic trap by a fixed-node diffusion Monte Carlo method. The interaction between all components is considered to be the same. We investigate how the energetic properties (energy, contact) and correlation functions (density profile and momentum distribution) evolve as the number of components is changed. It is shown that the system fermionizes in the limit of strong interactions. Analytical expressions are derived in the limit of weak interactions within the local density approximation for an arbitrary number of components and for one plus one particle using an exact solution.