Motion-Induced Polaron Resonance beyond the Orthogonality Catastrophe

Abstract

We investigate the spectroscopic response of a repulsively interacting, infinitely heavy impurity moving at constant velocity $v$ through a one-dimensional ideal Fermi gas. Using an exact functional-determinant approach, we calculate the Ramsey response and spectral function, fully accounting for many-body particle-hole excitations. We uncover a strongly nonmonotonic dependence on impurity velocity: decoherence is enhanced around the Fermi velocity, whereas sufficiently rapid motion restores a narrow, long-lived polaron resonance. A long-time wave-packet analysis yields analytical expressions for the polaron energy and decay rate over the full velocity range and quantitatively captures the numerical results. At high velocity, the polaron energy approaches the mean-field value, the decay rate vanishes as $1/v$, and the spectral weight approaches unity. Thus, rapid prescribed motion provides a dynamical route to suppressing the orthogonality catastrophe and restoring polaron coherence even for an infinitely heavy impurity, where recoil is entirely absent.