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 present a calculation of the spectral functions and the associated rf response of ultracold fermionic atoms near a Feshbach resonance. The single particle spectra are peaked at energies that can be modeled by a modified BCS dispersion. However, ev
en at very low temperatures their width is comparable to their energy, except for a small region around the dispersion minimum. The structure of the excitation spectrum of the unitary gas at infinite scattering length agrees with recent momentum-resolved rf spectra near the critical temperature. A detailed comparison is made with momentum integrated, locally resolved rf spectra of the unitary gas at arbitrary temperatures and shows very good agreement between theory and experiment. The pair size defined from the width of these spectra is found to coincide with that obtained from the leading gradient corrections to the effective field theory of the superfluid.
We show that strong pairing correlations in Fermi gases lead to the appearance of a gap-like structure in the RF-spectrum, both in the balanced superfluid and in the normal phase above the Clogston-Chandrasekhar limit. The average RF-shift of a unita
ry gas is proportional to the ratio of the Fermi velocity and the scattering length with the final state. In the strongly imbalanced case, the RF-spectrum measures the binding energy of a minority atom to the Fermi sea of majority atoms. Our results provide a qualitative understanding of recent experiments by Schunck et.al.
