Spectral functions of the strongly interacting three-dimensional Fermi gas

Computing dynamical properties of strongly interacting quantum many-body systems poses a major challenge to theoretical approaches. Usually, one has to resort to numerical analytic continuation of results on imaginary frequencies, which is a mathematically ill-defined procedure. Here we present an efficient method to compute the spectral functions of the two-component Fermi gas near the strongly interacting unitary limit directly in real frequencies. To this end, we combine the Keldysh path integral that is defined in real time with the self-consistent T-matrix approximation. The latter is known to predict thermodynamic and transport properties in good agreement with experimental observations in ultracold atoms. We validate our method by comparison with thermodynamic quantities obtained from imaginary-time calculations and by transforming our real-time propagators to imaginary time. By comparison with state-of-the-art numerical analytic continuation of the imaginary-time results, we show that our real-time results give qualitative improvements for dynamical quantities. Moreover, we show that no significant pseudogap regime exists in the self-consistent T-matrix approximation above the critical temperature Tc, an issue that has been under significant debate. We close by pointing out the versatile nature of our method as it can be extended to other systems, like the spin- or mass-imbalanced Fermi gas, other Bose-Fermi models, two-dimensional systems, and systems out of equilibrium. Published by the American Physical Society 2024