arXiv subjects

Manfred Salmhofer

Publications and source records attributed to Manfred Salmhofer.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Anderson orthogonality scaling in the Rabi-driven heavy Fermi polaron

The Anderson orthogonality catastrophe (AOC) is a paradigmatic many-body phenomenon in which a local perturbation induces a macroscopic response of a Fermi sea. We probe signatures of the AOC by coherently driving heavy Fermi polarons in an ultracold $^6$Li-$^{133}$Cs mixture. We observe a power-law dependence of the measured Rabi frequency on the drive strength, with exponents consistent with AOC predictions. Finite-temperature simulations quantitatively reproduce the observed scaling, indicating that AOC signatures persist beyond the idealized zero-temperature, infinite-mass limit. The damping of the Rabi oscillations provides access to polaron dephasing and reveals a nonmonotonic drive dependence, qualitatively consistent with current theories. Our results establish coherently driven impurities as a versatile probe of quantum many-body dynamics through local coherent control.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2026

Reflection Positivity in Free Fermionic Theories

Reflection positivity is one of the Osterwalder--Schrader axioms for Euclidean quantum field theory, ensuring that the reconstructed relativistic Hilbert space carries a positive-definite inner product. For free fermionic theories whose covariance is a real rational function of the Dirac operator, we prove that reflection positivity holds if and only if all poles are real, simple, and carry non-negative residues. We also explicitly show the failure of reflection positivity for covariances with exponential regulators.

math-ph↗

arXiv2026

Integrating Polchinski's equation by convergent binary tree expansions

We give a solution to Polchinski's equation for the Wilsonian effective action in terms of an expansion in binary trees, and prove that this expansion converges in fermionic field theories, provided the fermionic covariance has finite determinant and decay constants. A novel element of the proof are detailed combinatorial estimates for the number of leaf trees associated to binary trees. The method can be used on standard models of fermionic quantum field theory and quantum statistical mechanics.

math-ph↗

arXiv2026

Enhancing superconductivity using thermal bosons

We investigate how the strong coupling of a superconductor to thermal bosons can enhance its superconducting critical temperature. To tackle this problem, we use a renormalization group approach that allows us to describe the competition between density fluctuations and the build-up of boson-induced attraction between fermions. Capturing the mutual influence of bosonic and fermionic sectors, the self-consistent renormalization group framework predicts a robust increase of the critical temperature across a wide range of interactions. We find a nontrivial dependence of the critical temperature on the boson mass and we establish a phase diagram for enhanced superconductivity driven by bosons being either in the condensed or thermal state. We outline possible experimental realizations in cold atomic systems and discuss implementations using electron-exciton mixtures in van der Waals material heterostructures.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2025

Fate of an impurity strongly interacting with a thermal Bose gas

We spectroscopically study mobile impurities immersed in a homogeneous bosonic bath (a box-trapped Bose gas), varying the bath temperature and the strength of impurity-bath interactions. We compare our results to those for a quasipure Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), and find that for strong impurity-bath interactions, the spectra narrow with increasing temperature, while the impurity energy shift is suppressed. Near the critical temperature for condensation, many-body effects still play an important role, and only for a nondegenerate bath, the system approaches the classical Boltzmann-gas behavior. The key spectral features are reproduced within the theory of an ideal Bose polaron.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2025

A rigorous Keldysh functional integral for fermions

We provide a mathematically rigorous Keldysh functional integral for fermionic quantum field theories. We show convergence of a discrete-time Grassmann Gaussian integral representation in the time-continuum limit under very general hypotheses. We also prove analyticity of the effective action and explicit bounds for the truncated (connected) expectation values of the non-equilibrium system. These bounds imply clustering with a summable decay in the thermodynamic limit, provided these properties hold at time zero, and provided that the determinant bound and decay constant of the fermionic Keldysh covariance are bounded uniformly in the volume. We then give bounds for these constants and show that uniformity in the volume indeed holds for a general class of systems. Finally we show that in the setting of dissipative quantum systems, these bounds are not necessarily restricted to short times.

math-ph↗

arXiv2024

Bosonic Functional Determinant Approach and its Application to Polaron Spectra

The functional determinant approach (FDA) is a simple method to compute exactly certain observables for ideal quantum systems and has been successfully applied to the Fermi polaron problem to obtain the dynamical overlap and spectral function. Unfortunately, its application to Bosonic ultracold gases is prohibited by the failure of the grand canonical ensemble for these systems. In this paper, we show how to circumvent this problem and develop a Bosonic FDA. This yields exact injection and ejection spectra for ideal Bose polarons at arbitrary temperatures. While coherent features visible at absolute zero quickly smear out with rising temperature as expected, the line width of the main peak is, counterintuitively, found to decrease near unitarity. Furthermore, we provide explicit formulas for the overlap operator, which allow to compute the necessary determinants for both Bose and Fermi polarons more efficiently than previously possible.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2024

The majorant method for the fermionic effective action

We revisit the problem of controlling Polchinski's equation by the solution of an associate Hamilton-Jacobi equation which determines a norm majorant for the fermionic effective action. This method, referred to as the majorant method, was first introduced by D. Brydges and J. Wright in 1988, but its original formulation contains a gap which has never been addressed. We overcome this gap and show that the majorant equation and its existence condition are analogous to the ones originally obtained by Brydges and Wright. As an application of the method, we investigate a fermion model with a local quartic interaction.

math-ph↗

arXiv2023

Medium-induced Interaction Between Impurities in a Bose-Einstein Condensate

We consider two heavy particles immersed in a Bose-Einstein condensate in three dimensions and compute their mutual interaction induced by excitations of the medium. For an ideal Bose gas, the induced interaction is Newtonian up to a shift in distance which depends on the coupling strength between impurities and Bosons. For a real BEC, we find that on short distances, the induced potential is dominated by three-body physics of a single Boson bound to the impurities, leading to an Efimov potential. At large distances of the order of the healing length, a Yukawa potential emerges instead. In particular, we find that both regimes are realized for all impurity-boson couplings and determine the corresponding crossover scales. The transition from the real to the ideal condensate at low gas parameters is investigated.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2022

A Local Wheeler-DeWitt Measure for the String Landscape

According to the `Cosmological Central Dogma', de Sitter space can be viewed as a quantum mechanical system with a finite number of degrees of freedom, set by the horizon area. We use this assumption together with the Wheeler-DeWitt (WDW) equation to approach the measure problem of eternal inflation. Thus, our goal is to find a time-independent wave function of the universe on a total Hilbert space defined as the direct sum of a variety of subspaces: A finite-dimensional subspace for each de Sitter vacuum and an infinite-dimensional subspace for each terminal Minkowski or AdS vaccuum. We argue that, to be consistent with semiclassical intuition, such a solution requires the presence of sources. These are implemented as an inhomogenous term in the WDW equation, induced by the Hartle-Hawking no-boundary or the Linde/Vilenkin tunneling proposal. Taken together, these steps unambiguously lead to what we would like to think of as a `Local WDW measure,' where `local' refers to the fact that the dS part of the resulting wave function describes a superposition of static patches. The global 3-sphere spatial section of the entire multiverse makes no appearance.

hep-th↗

arXiv2021

Quench Dynamics of the Ideal Bose Polaron at Zero and Nonzero Temperatures

We give a detailed account of a stationary impurity in an ideal Bose-Einstein condensate, which we call the ideal Bose polaron, at both zero and non-zero temperatures and arbitrary strength of the impurity-boson coupling. The time evolution is solved exactly and it is found that, surprisingly, many of the features that have been predicted for the real BEC are already present in this simpler setting and can be understood analytically therein. We obtain explicit formulae for the time evolution of the condensate wave function at $T=0$ and of the one-particle density matrix at $T>0$. For negative scattering length, the system is found to thermalize even though the dynamics are perfectly coherent. The time evolution and thermal values of the Tan contact are derived and compared to a recent experiment. We find that contrary to the Fermi polaron, the contact is not bounded at unitarity as long as a condensate exists. An explicit formula for the dynamical overlap at $T=0$ allows us to compute the rf spectrum which can be understood in detail by relating it to the two-body problem of one boson and the impurity.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2020

Scattering of two heavy Fermi polarons: resonances and quasibound states

Impurities in a Fermi sea, or Fermi polarons, experience a Casimir interaction induced by quantum fluctuations of the medium. When there is short-range attraction between impurities and fermions, also the induced interaction between two impurities is strongly attractive at short distance and oscillates in space for larger distances. We theoretically investigate the scattering properties and compute the scattering phase shifts and scattering lengths between two heavy impurities in an ideal Fermi gas at zero temperature. While the induced interaction between impurities is weakly attractive for weak impurity-medium interactions, we find that impurities strongly and attractively interacting with the medium exhibit resonances in the induced scattering with a sign change of the induced scattering length and even strong repulsion. These resonances occur whenever a three-body Efimov bound state appears at the continuum threshold. At energies above the continuum threshold, we find that the Efimov state in medium can turn into a quasibound state with a finite decay width.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2020

Fermions meet two bosons -- the heteronuclear Efimov effect revisited

In this article, we revisit the heteronuclear Efimov effect in a Bose-Fermi mixture with large mass difference in the Born-Oppenheimer picture. As a specific example, we consider the combination of bosonic $^{133}\mathrm{Cs}$ and fermionic $^6\mathrm{Li}$. In a system consisting of two heavy bosons and one light fermion, the fermion-mediated potential between the two heavy bosons gives rise to an infinite series of three-body bound states. The intraspecies scattering length determines the three-body parameter and the scaling factor between consecutive Efimov states. In a second scenario, we replace the single fermion by an entire Fermi Sea at zero temperature. The emerging interaction potential for the two bosons exhibits long-range oscillations leading to a weakening of the binding and a breakup of the infinite series of Efimov states. In this scenario, the binding energies follow a modified Efimov scaling law incorporating the Fermi momentum. The scaling factor between deeply bound states is governed by the intraspecies interaction, analogous to the Efimov states in vacuum.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2020

Theory of a resonantly interacting impurity in a Bose-Einstein condensate

We investigate a Bose-Einstein condensate in strong interaction with a single impurity particle. While this situation has received considerable interest in recent years, the regime of strong coupling remained inaccessible to most approaches due to an instability in Bogoliubov theory arising near the resonance. We present a nonlocal extension of Gross-Pitaevskii theory that is free of such divergences and does not require the use of the Born approximation in any of the interaction potentials. We find a new dynamical transition regime between attractive and repulsive polarons, where an interaction quench results in a finite number of coherent oscillations in the density profiles of the medium and in the contact parameter before equilibrium is reached.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

arXiv2020

Functional Integral and Stochastic Representations for Ensembles of Identical Bosons on a Lattice

Regularized coherent-state functional integrals are derived for ensembles of identical bosons on a lattice, the regularization being a discretization of Euclidian time. Convergence of the time-continuum limit is shown for various discretized actions. The focus is on the integral representation for the partition function and expectation values in the canonical ensemble. The connection to the grand-canonical integral, and a number of differences, are discussed. Uniform bounds for covariances are proven, which simplify the analysis of the time-continuum limit and can also be used to analyze the thermodynamic limit. The relation to a stochastic representation by an ensemble of interacting random walks is made explicit, and its modifications in presence of a condensate are discussed.

math-ph↗

arXiv2019

Low-Energy Effective Theory at a Quantum Critical Point of the Two-Dimensional Hubbard Model: Mean-Field Analysis

We complement previous functional renormalization group (fRG) studies of the two-dimensional Hubbard model by mean-field calculations. The focus falls on Van Hove filling and the the hopping amplitude t'/t=0.341. The fRG data suggest a quantum critical point (QCP) in this region and in its vicinity a singular fermionic self-energy, Im $Σ(ω)/ω\sim |ω|^{-γ}$ with $γ\approx 0.26$. Here we start a more detailed investigation of this QCP using a bosonic formulation for the effective action, where the bosons couple to the order parameter fields. To this end, we use the channel decomposition of the fermionic effective action developed in [Phys. Rev. B 79, 195125 (2009)], which allows to perform Hubbard-Stratonovich transformations for all relevant order parameter fields at any given energy scale. We stop the flow at a scale where the correlations of the order parameter field are already pronounced, but the flow is still regular, and derive the effective boson theory. It contains d-wave superconducting, magnetic, and density-density interactions. We analyze the resulting phase diagram in the mean-field approximation. We show that the singular fermionic self-energy suppresses gap formation both in the superconducting and magnetic channel already at the mean-field level, thus rounding a first-order transition (without self-energy) to a quantum phase transition (with self-energy). We give a simple effective model that shows the generality of this effect. In the two-dimensional Hubbard model, the effective density-density interaction is peaked at a nonzero frequency, so that solving the mean-field equations already involves a functional equation instead of simply a matrix equation (on a technical level, similar to incommensurate phases). Within a certain approximation, we show that such an interaction leads to a short quasiparticle lifetime.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2019

Essentially No Barriers in Neural Network Energy Landscape

Training neural networks involves finding minima of a high-dimensional non-convex loss function. Knowledge of the structure of this energy landscape is sparse. Relaxing from linear interpolations, we construct continuous paths between minima of recent neural network architectures on CIFAR10 and CIFAR100. Surprisingly, the paths are essentially flat in both the training and test landscapes. This implies that neural networks have enough capacity for structural changes, or that these changes are small between minima. Also, each minimum has at least one vanishing Hessian eigenvalue in addition to those resulting from trivial invariance.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2019

Real-space dynamics of attractive and repulsive polarons in Bose-Einstein condensates

We investigate the formation of a Bose polaron when a single impurity in a Bose-Einstein condensate is quenched from a non-interacting to an attractively interacting state in the vicinity of a Feshbach resonance. We use a beyond-Fröhlich Hamiltonian to describe both sides of the resonance and a coherent-state variational ansatz to compute the time evolution of boson density profiles in position space. We find that on the repulsive side of the Feshbach resonance, the Bose polaron performs long-lived oscillations, which is surprising given that the two-body problem has only one bound state coupled to a continuum. They arise due to interference between multiply occupied bound states and therefore can be only found with many-body approaches such as the coherent-state ansatz. This is a distinguishing feature of the Bose polaron compared to the Fermi polaron where the bound state can be occupied only once. We derive an implicit equation for the frequency of these oscillations and show that it can be approximated by the energy of the two-body bound state. Finally, we consider an impurity introduced at non-zero velocity and find that, on the repulsive side, it is periodically slowed down or even arrested before speeding up again.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗