No Arabic abstract
The probability that a particle will stick to a surface is fundamental to a variety of processes in surface science, including catalysis, epitaxial growth, and corrosion. At ultralow energies, how particles scatter or stick to a surface affects the performance of atomic clocks, matter-wave interferometers, atom chips and other quantum information processing devices. In this energy regime, the sticking probability is influenced by a distinctly quantum mechanical effect: quantum reflection, a result of matter wave coherence, suppresses the probability of finding the particle near the surface and reduces the sticking probability. We find that another quantum effect can occur, further shaping the sticking probability: the orthogonality catastrophe, a result of the change in the quantum ground state of the surface in the presence of a particle, can dramatically alter the probability for quantum sticking and create a superreflective surface at low energies.
We consider a fixed impurity immersed in a Fermi gas at finite temperature. We take the impurity to have two internal spin states, where the $uparrow$ state is assumed to interact with the medium such that it exhibits the orthogonality catastrophe, while the $downarrow$ 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 Greens functions with a variational approach to treat the Rabi driven dynamics, we find that the system features Rabi oscillations whose frequency scales as a non-trivial 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 $textit{et al.}$, Nature $textbf{485}$, 615 (2012)], thus demonstrating the power of our approach.
We analyze the properties of an impurity in a dilute Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). First the quasiparticle residue of a static impurity in an ideal BEC is shown to vanish with increasing particle number as a stretched exponential, leading to a bosonic orthogonality catastrophe. Then we introduce a variational ansatz, which recovers this exact result and describes the macroscopic dressing of the impurity including its back-action onto the BEC as well as boson-boson repulsion beyond the Bogoliubov approximation. This ansatz predicts that the orthogonality catastrophe also occurs for mobile impurities, whenever the BEC becomes ideal. Finally, we show that our ansatz agrees well with experimental results.
We propose to investigate the full counting statistics of nonequilibrium spin transport with an ultracold atomic quantum gas. The setup makes use of the spin control available in atomic systems to generate spin transport induced by an impurity atom immersed in a spin-imbalanced two-component Fermi gas. In contrast to solid-state realizations, in ultracold atoms spin relaxation and the decoherence from external sources is largely suppressed. As a consequence, once the spin current is turned off by manipulating the internal spin degrees of freedom of the Fermi system, the nonequilibrium spin population remains constant. Thus one can directly count the number of spins in each reservoir to investigate the full counting statistics of spin flips, which is notoriously challenging in solid state devices. Moreover, using Ramsey interferometry, the dynamical impurity response can be measured. Since the impurity interacts with a many-body environment that is out of equilibrium, our setup provides a way to realize the non-equilibrium orthogonality catastrophe. Here, even for spin reservoirs initially prepared in a zero-temperature state, the Ramsey response exhibits an exponential decay, which is in contrast to the conventional power-law decay of Andersons orthogonality catastrophe. By mapping our system to a multi-step Fermi sea, we are able to derive analytical expressions for the impurity response at late times. This allows us to reveal an intimate connection of the decay rate of the Ramsey contrast and the full counting statistics of spin flips.
We present an analog of the phenomenon of orthogonality catastrophe in quantum many body systems subject to a local dissipative impurity. We show that the fidelity $F(t)$, giving a measure for distance of the time-evolved state from the initial one, displays a universal scaling form $F(t)propto t^theta e^{-gamma t}$, when the system supports long range correlations, in a fashion reminiscent of traditional instances of orthogonality catastrophe in condensed matter. An exponential fall-off at rate $gamma$ signals the onset of environmental decoherence, which is critically slowed down by the additional algebraic contribution to the fidelity. This picture is derived within a second order cumulant expansion suited for Liouvillian dynamics, and substantiated for the one-dimensional transverse field quantum Ising model subject to a local dephasing jump operator, as well as for XY and XX quantum spin chains, and for the two dimensional Bose gas deep in the superfluid phase with local particle heating. Our results hint that local sources of dissipation can be used to inspect real-time correlations and to induce a delay of decoherence in open quantum many body systems.
Using variational mean-field theory, many-body dissipative effects on the threshold law for quantum sticking and reflection of neutral and charged particles are examined. For the case of an ohmic bosonic bath, we study the effects of the infrared divergence on the probability of sticking and obtain a non-perturbative expression for the sticking rate. We find that for weak dissipative coupling $alpha$, the low energy threshold laws for quantum sticking are modified by an infrared singularity in the bath. The sticking probability for a neutral particle with incident energy $Eto 0$ behaves asymptotically as ${it s}sim E^{(1+alpha)/2(1-alpha)}$; for a charged particle, we obtain ${it s}sim E^{alpha/2(1-alpha)}$. Thus, quantum mirrors --surfaces that become perfectly reflective to particles with incident energies asymptotically approaching zero-- can also exist for charged particles.