Decoherence and momentum relaxation in Fermi-polaron Rabi dynamics: a kinetic equation approach

Despite the paradigmatic nature of the Fermi-polaron model, the theoretical description of its nonlinear dynamics poses challenges. Here, we apply a quantum kinetic theory of driven polarons to recent experiments with ultracold atoms, where Rabi oscillations between a Fermi-polaron state and a non-interacting level were reported. The resulting equations separate decoherence from momentum relaxation, with the corresponding rates showing a different dependence on microscopic scattering processes and quasi-particle properties. We describe both the polaron ground state and the excited repulsive-polaron state and we find a good quantitative agreement between our predictions and the available experimental data without any fitting parameter. Our approach not only takes into account collisional phenomena, but also it can be used to study the different roles played by decoherence and the collisional integral in the strongly interacting highly-imbalanced mixture of Fermi gases.