2013/07/31 by A. N. Wenz, G. Zürn, S. Murmann +3 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.quant-gas
paper · pdf · doi:10.1126/science.1240516
published as Science 342, 6157 pp. 457-460 (2013) · 9 pages, 5 figures
arxiv created 2013/10/25 · arxiv updated 2013/10/28
Knowing when a physical system has reached sufficient size for its macroscopic properties to be well described by many-body theory is difficult. We investigate the crossover from few to many-body physics by studying quasi one-dimensional systems of ultracold atoms consisting of a single impurity interacting with an increasing number of identical fermions. We measure the interaction energy of such a system as a function of the number of majority atoms for different strengths of the interparticle interaction. As we increase the number of majority atoms one by one we observe the fast convergence of the normalized interaction energy towards a many-body limit calculated for a single impurity immersed in a Fermi sea of majority particles.