English

Boiling a Unitary Fermi Liquid

Quantum Gases 2019-03-13 v2 Statistical Mechanics Strongly Correlated Electrons

Abstract

We study the thermal evolution of a highly spin-imbalanced, homogeneous Fermi gas with unitarity limited interactions, from a Fermi liquid of polarons at low temperatures to a classical Boltzmann gas at high temperatures. Radio-frequency spectroscopy gives access to the energy, lifetime, and short-range correlations of Fermi polarons at low temperatures TT. In this regime, we observe a characteristic T2T^2 dependence of the spectral width, corresponding to the quasiparticle decay rate expected for a Fermi liquid. At high TT, the spectral width decreases again towards the scattering rate of the classical, unitary Boltzmann gas, T1/2\propto T^{-1/2}. In the transition region between the quantum degenerate and classical regime, the spectral width attains its maximum, on the scale of the Fermi energy, indicating the breakdown of a quasiparticle description. Density measurements in a harmonic trap directly reveal the majority dressing cloud surrounding the minority spins and yield the compressibility along with the effective mass of Fermi polarons.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1811.00481,
  title  = {Boiling a Unitary Fermi Liquid},
  author = {Zhenjie Yan and Parth B. Patel and Biswaroop Mukherjee and Richard J. Fletcher and Julian Struck and Martin W. Zwierlein},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.00481},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

Accepted version at PRL

R2 v1 2026-06-23T05:00:57.607Z