A single impurity in an ideal atomic Fermi gas: current understanding and some open problems

Abstract: We briefly review some current theoretical and experimental aspects of the problem of a single spinless impurity in a 3D polarised atomic Fermi gas at zero temperature where the interactions can be tuned using a wide Feshbach resonance. We show that various few-body states in vacuum composed of the impurity and background gas atoms (single impurity, dimer, trimer, tetramer) give rise to corresponding dressed states ({\em polaron}, {\em dimeron}, {\em trimeron}, {\em tetrameron}) in the gas and inherit many of their characteristics. We study the ground state focussing on the choice of wave function and its properties. We raise a few unsolved problems: whether the polaron and dimeron are really separate branches, what other few-body states might exist, the nature of the groundstate for large numbers of particle-hole pairs and why is the polaron ansatz so good. We then turn to the excited states, and to the calculation of the effective mass. We examine the bounds on the effective mass and raise a conjecture about that of composite quasiparticle states.