Mobile impurity probing a two-dimensional superfluid phase transition

Abstract

The use of atomically sized quantum systems as highly sensitive measuring devices represents an exciting and quickly growing research field. Here, we explore the properties of a quasiparticle formed by a mobile impurity interacting with a two-dimensional fermionic superfluid. The energy of the quasiparticle is shown to be lowered by superfluid pairing as this increases the compressibility of the Fermi gas, thereby making it easier for the impurity to perturb its surroundings. We demonstrate that the fundamentally discontinuous nature of the superfluid to normal phase transition of a two-dimensional system, leads to a rapid increase in the quasiparticle energy around the critical temperature. The magnitude of this increase exhibits a nonmonotonic behavior as a function of the pairing strength with a sizable maximum in the cross-over region, where the spatial extend of the Cooper pairs is comparable to the interparticle spacing. Since the quasiparticle energy is measurable with present experimental techniques, our results illustrate how impurities entangled with their environment can serve as useful probes for non-trivial thermal and quantum correlations.