No Arabic abstract
We consider the highly spin-imbalanced limit of a two-component Fermi gas, where there is a small density of $downarrow$ impurities attractively interacting with a sea of $uparrow$ fermions. In the single-impurity limit at zero temperature, there exists the so-called polaron-molecule transition, where the impurity sharply changes its character by binding a $uparrow$ fermion at sufficiently strong attraction. Using a recently developed variational approach, we calculate the thermodynamic properties of the impurity, and we show that the transition becomes a smooth crossover at finite temperature due to the thermal occupation of excited states in the impurity spectral function. However, remnants of the single-impurity transition are apparent in the momentum-resolved spectral function, which can in principle be probed with Raman spectroscopy. We furthermore show that the Tan contact exhibits a characteristic non-monotonic dependence on temperature that provides a signature of the zero-temperature polaron-molecule transition. For a finite impurity density, we argue that descriptions purely based on the behavior of the Fermi polaron are invalid near the polaron-molecule transition, since correlations between impurities cannot be ignored. In particular, we show that the spin-imbalanced system undergoes phase separation at low temperatures due to the strong attraction between $uparrowdownarrow$ molecules induced by the Fermi sea. Thus, we find that the impurity spectrum and the induced impurity-impurity interactions are key to understanding the phase diagram of the spin-imbalanced Fermi gas.
A single down spin Fermion with an attractive, zero range interaction with a Fermi sea of up-spin Fermions forms a polaronic quasiparticle. The associated quasiparticle weight vanishes beyond a critical strength of the attractive interaction, where a many-body bound state is formed. From a variational wavefunction in the molecular limit, we determine the critical value for the polaron to molecule transition. The value agrees well with the diagrammatic Monte Carlo results of Prokofev and Svistunov and is consistent with recent rf-spectroscopy measurements of the quasiparticle weight by Schirotzek et. al. In addition, we calculate the contact coefficient of the strongly imbalanced gas, using the adiabatic theorem of Tan and discuss the implications of the polaron to molecule transition for the phase diagram of the attractive Fermi gas at finite imbalance.
We investigate the metastable repulsive branch of a mobile impurity coupled to a degenerate Fermi gas via short-range interactions. We show that the quasiparticle lifetime of this repulsive Fermi polaron can be experimentally probed by driving Rabi oscillations between weakly and strongly interacting impurity states. Using a time-dependent variational approach, we find that we can accurately model the impurity Rabi oscillations that were recently measured for repulsive Fermi polarons in both two and three dimensions. Crucially, our theoretical description does not include relaxation processes to the lower-lying attractive branch. Thus, the theory-experiment agreement demonstrates that the quasiparticle lifetime is determined by many-body dephasing within the upper repulsive branch rather than by the metastability of the upper branch itself. Our findings shed light on recent experimental observations of persistent repulsive correlations, and have important consequences for the nature and stability of the strongly repulsive Fermi gas.
We consider spin transport in a two-component ultracold Fermi gas with attractive interspecies interactions close to the BCS pairing transition. In particular, we consider the spin-transport relaxation rate and the spin-diffusion constant. Upon approaching the transition, the scattering amplitude is enhanced by pairing fluctuations. However, as the system approaches the transition, the spectral weight for excitations close to the Fermi level is decreased by the formation of a pseudogap. To study the consequence of these two competing effects, we determine the spin-transport relaxation rate and the spin-diffusion constant using both a Boltzmann approach and a diagrammatic approach. The former ignores pseudogap physics and finite lifetime effects. In the latter, we incorporate the full pseudogap physics and lifetime effects, but we ignore vertex corrections, so that we effectively calculate single-particle relaxation rates instead of transport relaxation rates. We find that there is qualitative agreement between these two approaches although the results for the transport coefficients differ quantitatively.
Recently, the topics of many-body localization (MBL) and one-dimensional strongly interacting few-body systems have received a lot of interest. These two topics have been largely developed separately. However, the generality of the latter as far as external potentials are concerned -- including random and quasirandom potentials -- and their shared spatial dimensionality, makes it an interesting way of dealing with MBL in the strongly interacting regime. Utilising tools developed for few-body systems we look to gain insight into the localization properties of the spin in a Fermi gas with strong interactions. We observe a delocalized--localized transition over a range of fillings of a quasirandom lattice. We find this transition to be of a different nature for low and high fillings, due to the diluteness of the system for low fillings.
We report exact numerical calculation of chemical potential, condensate fraction and specific heat of $N$ non-interacting bosons confined in an isotropic harmonic oscillator trap in one, two and three dimensions, as also for interacting bosons in a 3D trap. Quasi phase transitions are observed in all these cases, including one-dimension, as shown by a rapid change of all the thermodynamic quantities at the transition point. The change becomes more rapid as $N$ increases in 2D and 3D cases. However with increase in $N$, the sudden change in the nature of specific heat, gets gradually wiped out in 1D, while it becomes more drastic in 2D and 3D. The sudden change in the nature of condensate fraction and chemical potential as $N$ increases becomes more drastic even in 1D. Defining transition exponents, which characterize the nature of a thermodynamic quantity at the transition point of a quasi phase transition, we evaluate them by careful numerical calculation very near the transition temperature. These exponents are found to be independent of the size of the system and whether the bosons are interacting or not, demonstrating their universality property.