Trimers, molecules and polarons in imbalanced atomic Fermi gases

Abstract

We consider the ground state of a single "spin-down" impurity atom interacting attractively with a "spin-up" atomic Fermi gas. By constructing variational wave functions for polarons, molecules and trimers, we perform a detailed study of the transitions between each of these dressed bound states as a function of mass ratio $r=m_{\uparrow }/m_{\downarrow }$ and interaction strength. We find that the presence of a Fermi sea enhances the stability of the $p$-wave trimer, which can be viewed as a Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) molecule that has bound an additional majority atom. For sufficiently large $r$, we find that the transitions lie outside the region of phase separation in imbalanced Fermi gases and should thus be observable in experiment, unlike the well-studied equal-mass case.

5 pages, 2 figures

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Cited by in corpus (2)

• Polaron-molecule transitions in a two-dimensional Fermi gas
• Anomalous Dimers in Quantum Mixtures near Broad Resonances: Pauli Blocking, Fermi Surface Dynamics and Implications