Polaron residue and spatial structure in a Fermi gas

Abstract

We study the problem of a mobile impurity of mass $M$ interacting {\sl via} a s-wave broad or narrow Feshbach resonance with a Fermi sea of particles of mass $m$. Truncating the Hilbert space to at most one pair of particle-hole excitations of the Fermi sea, we determine ground state properties of the polaronic branch other than its energy, namely the polaron quasiparticle residue $Z$, and the impurity-to-fermion pair correlation function $G(x)$. We show that $G(x)$ deviates from unity at large distances as $-(A\_4+B\_4\cos 2k\_Fx)/(k\_Fx{)}^4$, where $k\_F$ is the Fermi momentum; since $A\_4>0$ and $B\_4>0$, the polaron has a diverging rms radius and exhibits Friedel-like oscillations. In the weakly attractive limit, we obtain analytical results, that in particular detect the failure of the Hilbert space truncation for a diverging mass impurity, as expected from Anderson orthogonality catastrophe; at distances between $\sim 1/k\_F$ and the asymptotic distance where the $1/x^4$ law applies, they reveal that $G(x)$ exhibits an intriguing multiscale structure.

With respect to published version: augmented version giving a sum rule for the pair correlation function for an infinite-mass impurity