Phase-separation dynamics induced by an interaction quench of a correlated Fermi-Fermi mixture in a double well

We explore the interspecies interaction quench dynamics of ultracold spin-polarized few-body mass-balanced Fermi-Fermi mixtures confined in a double well with an emphasis on the beyond Hartree-Fock correlation effects. It is shown that the ground state of particle-imbalanced mixtures exhibits a symmetry breaking of the single-particle density for strong interactions in the Hartree-Fock limit, which is altered within the many-body approach. Quenching the interspecies repulsion towards the strongly interacting regime, the two species phase separate within the Hartree-Fock approximation while remaining miscible in the many-body treatment. Despite their miscible character on the one-body level, the two species are found to be strongly correlated and exhibit a phase separation on the two-body level that suggests the antiferromagneticlike behavior of the few-body mixture. For particle-balanced mixtures we show that an intrawell fragmentation (filamentation) of the density occurs both for the ground state and upon quenching from weak to strong interactions, a result that is exclusively caused by the presence of strong correlations. By inspecting the two-body correlations, a phase separation of the two species is unveiled, being a precursor towards an antiferromagnetic state. Finally, we simulate in situ single-shot measurements and showcase how our findings can be retrieved by averaging over a sample of single-shot images.