Gradient Catastrophe and Fermi Edge Resonances in Fermi Gas

Abstract

A smooth spatial disturbance of the Fermi surface in a Fermi gas inevitably becomes sharp. This phenomenon, called {\it the gradient catastrophe}, causes the breakdown of a Fermi sea to disconnected parts with multiple Fermi points. We study how the gradient catastrophe effects probing the Fermi system via a Fermi edge singularity measurement. We show that the gradient catastrophe transforms the single-peaked Fermi-edge singularity of the tunneling (or absorption) spectrum to a set of multiple asymmetric singular resonances. Also we gave a mathematical formulation of FES as a matrix Riemann-Hilbert problem.