Publications Cosetta BARONI

2023

Preprint

• C. Baroni, B. Huang, I. Fritsche, E. Dobler, G. Anich, E. Kirilov, R. Grimm, M. A. Bastarrachea-Magnani, P. Massignan, G. Bruun Mediated interactions between Fermi polarons and the role of impurity quantum statistics, (2023-05-08), arXiv:2305.04915 arXiv:2305.04915 (ID: 721077) Toggle Abstract
  The notion of quasi-particles is essential for understanding the behaviour of complex many-body systems. A prototypical example of a quasi-particle, a polaron, is an impurity strongly interacting with a surrounding medium. Fermi polarons, created in a Fermi sea, provide a paradigmatic realization of this concept. As an inherent and important property such quasi-particles interact with each other via modulation of the medium. While quantum simulation experiments with ultracold atoms have significantly improved our understanding of individual polarons, the detection of their interactions has remained elusive in these systems. Here, we report the unambiguous observation of mediated interactions between Fermi polarons consisting of K impurities embedded in a Fermi sea of Li atoms. Our results confirm two landmark predictions of Landau's Fermi-liquid theory: the shift of the polaron energy due to mediated interactions, linear in the concentration of impurities, and its sign inversion with impurity quantum statistics. For weak to moderate interactions between the impurities and the medium, we find excellent agreement with the static (zero-momentum and energy) predictions of Fermi-liquid theory. For stronger impurity-medium interactions, we show that the observed behaviour at negative energies can be explained by a more refined many-body treatment including retardation and molecule formation

2021

Article

• I. Fritsche, C. Baroni, E. Dobler, E. Kirilov, B. Huang, R. Grimm, G. Bruun, P. Massignan Stability and breakdown of Fermi polarons in a strongly interacting Fermi-Bose mixture, Phys. Rev. A 103 53314 (2021-05-17), http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.103.053314 doi:10.1103/PhysRevA.103.053314 (ID: 720640) Toggle Abstract
  We investigate the properties of a strongly interacting imbalanced mixture of bosonic 41K impurities immersed in a Fermi sea of ultracold 6Li atoms. This enables us to explore the Fermi polaron for large impurity concentrations including the case where they form a Bose-Einstein condensate. The system is characterized by means of radio-frequency injection spectroscopy for tunable interactions using an interspecies Feshbach resonance. We find that the energy of the Fermi polarons formed in the thermal fraction of the impurity cloud remains rather insensitive to the impurity concentration, even as we approach equal densities for both species. The apparent insensitivity to high concentration is consistent with the theoretical prediction, based on Landau's quasiparticle theory, of a weak effective interaction between the polarons. The condensed fraction of the bosonic 41K gas is much denser than its thermal component, which leads to a break-down of the Fermi polaron description. Instead, we observe a new branch in the radio-frequency spectrum with a small energy shift, which is consistent with the presence of Bose polarons formed by 6Li fermions inside the 41K condensate. A closer investigation of the behavior of the condensate by means of Rabi oscillation measurements support this observation, indicating that we have realized Fermi and Bose polarons, two fundamentally different quasiparticles, in one cloud.

2020

Article

• C. Baroni, G. Gori, M. L. Chiofalo, A. Trombettoni Effect of Inter-Well Interactions on Non-Linear Beam Splitters for Matter-Wave Interferometers, Condensed Matter 5 31 (2020-04-21), http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/condmat5020031 doi:10.3390/condmat5020031 (ID: 720521)

2019

Article

• B. Huang, I. Fritsche, R. Lous, C. Baroni, J. T. Walraven, E. Kirilov, R. Grimm Breathing Mode of a BEC Repulsively Interacting with a Fermionic Reservoir, Phys. Rev. A 99 41602 (2019-04-03), http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.99.041602 doi:10.1103/PhysRevA.99.041602 (ID: 720106) Toggle Abstract
  We investigate the fundamental breathing mode of a small-sized elongated Bose-Einstein condensate coupled to a large Fermi sea of atoms. Our observations show a dramatic shift of the breathing frequency when the mixture undergoes phase separation at strong interspecies repulsion. We find that the maximum frequency shift in the full phase-separation limit depends essentially on the atom number ratio of the components. We interpret the experimental observations within a model that assumes an adiabatic response of the Fermi sea, or within another model that considers single fermion trajectories for a fully phase-separated mixture. These two complementary models capture the observed features over the full range of interest.