Functional-renormalization-group approach to strongly coupled Bose-Fermi mixtures in two dimensions

We study theoretically the phase diagram of strongly coupled two-dimensional Bose-Fermi mixtures interacting with attractive short-range potentials as a function of the particle densities. We focus on the limit where the size of the bound state between a boson and a fermion is small compared to the average interboson separation and develop a functional-renormalization-group approach that accounts for the bound-state physics arising from the extended Frohlich Hamiltonian. By including three-body correlations we are able to reproduce the polaron-to-molecule transition in two-dimensional Fermi gases in the extreme limit of vanishing boson density. We predict frequency- and momentum-resolved spectral functions and study the impact of three-body correlations on quasiparticle properties. At finite boson density, we find that when the bound-state energy exceeds the Fermi energy by a critical value, the fermions and bosons can form a fermionic composite with a well-defined Fermi surface. These composites constitute a Fermi sea of dressed Feshbach molecules in the case of ultracold atoms, while in the case of atomically thin semiconductors a trion liquid emerges. As the boson density is increased further, the effective energy gap of the composites decreases, leading to a transition into a strongly correlated phase where polarons are hybridized with molecular degrees of freedom. We highlight the universal connection between two-dimensional semiconductors and ultracold atoms, and we discuss perspectives for further exploring the rich structure of strongly coupled Bose-Fermi mixtures in these complementary systems.

Automated summary

We study the phase diagram of strongly coupled two-dimensional Bose-Fermi mixtures interacting with attractive short-range potentials as a function of the particle densities. We develop a functional-renormalization-group approach that accounts for the bound-state physics arising from the extended Frohlich Hamiltonian. By including three-body correlations, we reproduce the polaron-to-molecule transition and predict spectral functions and quasiparticle properties. We find that at finite boson density, fermions and bosons can form a fermionic composite with a well-defined Fermi surface, and as the boson density increases, there is a transition into a strongly correlated phase.