Orthogonality catastrophe and decoherence in a trapped-Fermion environment

TL;DR

This paper explores the orthogonality catastrophe and decoherence phenomena in ultracold trapped Fermi gases, providing an analytic framework for out-of-equilibrium responses and linking transient dynamics to impurity decoherence and non-Markovian effects.

Contribution

It offers an analytic description of the orthogonality catastrophe in ultracold gases and connects impurity decoherence to non-Markovian dynamics.

Findings

Analytic model of out-of-equilibrium response at zero and finite temperature.

Demonstration of the orthogonality catastrophe in ultracold trapped gases.

Link between impurity decoherence and non-Markovianity of dynamics.

Abstract

The Fermi edge singularity and the Anderson orthogonality catastrophe describe the universal physics which occurs when a Fermi sea is locally quenched by the sudden switching of a scattering potential, leading to a brutal disturbance of its ground state. We demonstrate that the effect can be seen in the controllable domain of ultracold trapped gases by providing an analytic description of the out-of-equilibrium response to an atomic impurity, both at zero and at finite temperature. Furthermore, we link the transient behavior of the gas to the decoherence of the impurity, and, in particular to the amount of non-markovianity of its dynamics.