Publications Erich DOBLER

2023

Articles

• 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, Nature Phys. 20 (2023-10-26), http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41567-023-02248-4 doi:10.1038/s41567-023-02248-4 (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
• 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, Nature Phys. (2023-10-26), http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41567-023-02248-4 doi:10.1038/s41567-023-02248-4 (ID: 721140) 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 is a polaron, formed by an impurity strongly interacting with a surrounding medium. Fermi polarons, created in a Fermi sea, provide a paradigmatic realization of this concept. Importantly, such quasi-particles interact with each other via the modulation of the medium. However, although quantum simulation experiments with ultracold atoms have substantially improved our understanding of individual polarons, the detection of their interactions has so far remained elusive. Here we report the observation of mediated interactions between Fermi polarons consisting of K impurities embedded in a Fermi sea of Li atoms. Our results confirm two predictions of Landau’s Fermi-liquid theory: the shift in polaron energy due to mediated interactions, which is 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, our results agree with the static 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 dressed 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.