Effective pair interaction between impurity particles induced by a dense Fermi gas

Abstract

We study the dynamics of a small number of impurity particles coupled to the ideal Fermi gas in a $d$-dimensional box. The impurities interact with the fermions via a two-body potential $\lambda v(x)$ where $\lambda$ is a coupling constant and $v(x)$ for instance a screened Coulomb potential. After taking the large-volume limit at positive Fermi momentum $k_F$ we consider the regime of high density of the fermions, that is, $k_F$ large compared to one. For coupling constants that scale like $\lambda^2 \sim k_F^{(2-d)}$ we show that the impurity particles effectively decouple from the fermions but evolve with an attractive pair interaction among each other which is induced by fluctuations in the Fermi gas.