Quasiparticle decay in a one-dimensional Bose-Fermi mixture

Abstract

In a one-dimensional weakly interacting Bose-Fermi mixture one branch of elementary excitations is well described by the Bogoliubov spectrum. Here we use the microscopic theory to study the decay of such quasiparticle excitations. The main scattering process which leads to their decay is the backscattering of a Bogoliubov quasiparticle off the Fermi sea, where a particle-hole pair is excited. For a low-momentum quasiparticle (phonon) of momentum $q$, we find that the decay rate scales as $q^3$ provided $q$ is smaller than the Fermi momentum $k_F$, while in the opposite case the decay behaves as $q^2$. If the ratio of the masses of fermions and bosons equals to the ratio of the boson-fermion and the boson-boson interaction strengths, the decay rate changes dramatically. It scales as $q^7$ for $q k_F$. For a high momentum Bogoliubov quasiparticle, we find a constant decay rate for $q k_F$. We also find an analytic expression for the decay rate in the crossover region between low and high momenta. The decay rate is a continuous, but nonanalytic function of the momentum at $q=k_F$. In the special case when the parameters of our system correspond to the integrable model, we observe that the decay rate vanishes.