Attractive and repulsive Fermi polarons in two dimensions

The dynamics of a single impurity in an environment is a fundamental problem in many-body physics. In the solid state, a well known case is an impurity coupled to a bosonic bath (such as lattice vibrations); the impurity and its accompanying lattice distortion form a new entity, a polaron. This quasiparticle plays an important role in the spectral function of high-transition-temperature superconductors, as well as in colossal magnetoresistance in manganites(1). For impurities in a fermionic bath, studies have considered heavy or immobile impurities which exhibit Anderson's orthogonality catastrophe(2) and the Kondo effect(3). More recently, mobile impurities have moved into the focus of research, and they have been found to form new quasiparticles known as Fermi polarons(4-7). The Fermi polaron problem constitutes the extreme, but conceptually simple, limit of two important quantum many-body problems: the crossover between a molecular Bose-Einstein condensate and a superfluid with BCS (Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer) pairing with spin-imbalance(8) for attractive interactions, and Stoner's itinerant ferromagnetism(9) for repulsive interactions. It has been proposed that such quantum phases (and other elusive exotic states) might become realizable in Fermi gases confined to two dimensions(10,11). Their stability and observability are intimately related to the theoretically debated(12-16) properties of the Fermi polaron in a two-dimensional Fermi gas. Here we create and investigate Fermi polarons in a two-dimensional, spin-imbalanced Fermi gas, measuring their spectral function using momentum-resolved photoemission spectroscopy(17-19). For attractive interactions, we find evidence for a disputed pairing transition between polarons and tightly bound dimers, which provides insight into the elementary pairing mechanism of imbalanced, strongly coupled two-dimensional Fermi gases. Additionally, for repulsive interactions, we study novel quasiparticles-repulsive polarons-the lifetime of which determines the possibility of stabilizing repulsively interacting Fermi systems.