Litcius/Paper detail

Exact Quasiparticle Properties of a Heavy Polaron in BCS Fermi Superfluids

Jia Wang, Xia-Ji Liu, Hui Hu

2022Physical Review Letters31 citationsDOIOpen Access PDF

Abstract

We present the Ramsey response and radio-frequency spectroscopy of a heavy impurity immersed in an interacting Fermi superfluid, using the exact functional determinant approach. We describe the Fermi superfluid through the conventional Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer theory and investigate the role of the pairing gap on quasiparticle properties revealed by the two spectroscopies. The energy cost for pair breaking prevents Anderson's orthogonality catastrophe that occurs in a noninteracting Fermi gas and allows the existence of polaron quasiparticles in the exactly solvable heavy impurity limit. Hence, we rigorously confirm the remarkable features such as dark continuum, molecule-hole continuum, and repulsive polaron. For a magnetic impurity scattering at finite temperature, we predict additional resonances related to the subgap Yu-Shiba-Rusinov bound state, whose positions can be used to measure the superfluid pairing gap. For a nonmagnetic scattering at zero temperature, we surprisingly find undamped repulsive polarons. These exact results might be readily observed in quantum gas experiments with Bose-Fermi mixtures that have a large-mass ratio.

Topics & Concepts

PhysicsQuasiparticleSuperfluidityPolaronCondensed matter physicsPairingFermi gasQuantum mechanicsSuperconductivityElectronCold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein CondensatesPhysics of Superconductivity and MagnetismQuantum, superfluid, helium dynamics
Exact Quasiparticle Properties of a Heavy Polaron in BCS Fermi Superfluids | Litcius