Fermi polarons and beyond

Abstract

These lecture notes give a brief introduction to the so-called Fermi-polaron problem, which explores the behaviour of a mobile impurity introduced into an ideal Fermi gas. While this problem has been considered now for more than a decade in ultracold atomic gases, it continues to generate surprises and insights as new quantum mixtures emerge, both in atomic gases and in the solid state. Here we summarise the basic theory for the Fermi polaron with a focus on the three-dimensional case, although the results can be straightforwardly generalised to two dimensions. Our aim is to provide a pedagogical treatment of the subject and we thus cover fundamental topics such as scattering theory and renormalisation. We discuss the ground state of the Fermi polaron and how it is connected to the phase diagram of the spin-imbalanced Fermi gas, and we also give a brief overview of the energy spectrum and non-equilibrium dynamics. Throughout, we highlight how the static and dynamic behaviour of the Fermi polaron is well described using intuitive variational approaches.