Polaron formation in insulators and the key role of hole scattering processes in band insulators, charge density waves, and Mott transitions

A mobile impurity immersed in a noninteracting Fermi sea is dressed by the gapless particle-hole excitations of the fermionic medium. This conventional Fermi-polaron setting is well described by the so-called ladder approximation, which consists of neglecting impurity-hole scattering processes. In this work, we analyze polaron formation in the context of insulating states of matter, considering increasing levels of correlation in the medium: band insulators originating from external periodic potentials, spontaneously formed charge density waves, and a Fermi-Hubbard system undergoing a metal-Mott insulator transition. The polaron spectral function is shown to exhibit striking signatures of the underlying fermionic background, such as the single-particle band gap, particle-hole symmetry and the transition to the Mott state. These signatures are identified within the framework of the Chevy ansatz, i.e., upon restricting the Hilbert space to single particle-hole excitations. Interestingly, we find that the ladder approximation is inaccurate in these band systems, due to the fact that the particle and hole scattering phase spaces are comparable. Our results provide a step forward in the understanding of polaron formation in correlated many-body media, which are relevant to both cold-atom and semiconductor experiments. Published by the American Physical Society 2024