Orthogonality catastrophe and decoherence in a trapped-Fermion environment

Understand

The Fermi edge singularity and the Anderson orthogonality catastrophe describe the universal physics which occurs when a Fermi sea is locally quenched by the sudden switching of a scattering potential, leading to a brutal disturbance of its ground state.

• We demonstrate that the effect can be seen in the controllable domain of ultracold trapped gases by providing an analytic description of the out-of-equilibrium response to an atomic impurity, both at zero and at finite temperature.
• Furthermore, we link the transient behavior of the gas to the decoherence of the impurity, and, in particular to the amount of non-markovianity of its dynamics.