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We study the repulsive Fermi polaron in a two-component, two-dimensional system of fermionic atoms inspired by the results of a recent experiment with 173Yb atoms [N. Darkwah Oppong et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 193604 (2019)]. We use the diffusion Monte Carlo method to report properties such as the polaron energy and the quasiparticle residue that have been measured in that experiment. To provide insight into the quasiparticle character of the problem, we also report results for the effective mass. We show that the effective range, together with the scattering length, is needed in order to reproduce the experimental results. Using different model potentials for the interaction between the Fermi sea and the impurity, we show that it is possible to establish a regime of universality, in terms of these two parameters, that includes the whole experimental regime. This illustrates the relevance of quantum fluctuations and beyond mean-field effects to correctly describe the Fermi polaron problem., This work has been partly supported by the MINECO (Spain) Grant No. FIS2017-84114-C2-1-P and MICINN (Spain) Project No. PID2019-107396GBI00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033. We acknowledge financial support from Secretaría d’Universitats i Recerca del Departament d’Empresa i Coneixement de la Generalitat de Catalunya, cofunded by the European Union Regional Development Fund within the ERDF Operational Program of Catalunya (project QuantumCat, ref. 001-P-001644). V.C. acknowledges financial support from the Project HPC-EUROPA3 (INFRAIA-2016-1-730897), with the support of the EC Research Innovation Action under the H2020 Programme. J.S-B. acknowledges the FPU fellowship with reference FPU15/01805 from MCIU (Spain).

The study of changes in climate on the scale of the entire history of Earth requires absolute dating methods that cover the total time period. 230 Th and 234 U disequilibria, as well as 231 Pa and 235 U, have shown as good candidates to provide ages older than 50 ky. Therefore, they are the basis for a method that allows extending the 14 C dating up to 500 ky or even further. The wide variety of samples, their high number and the fact that several radionuclides are needed to obtain samples’ chronology make γ spectrometry to be a suitable technique in this task. However, its low efficiency and high background, therefore, high detection limits in comparison with α spectrometry, need to be improved to become a real alternative in samples with very low activity levels. With this purpose, Mazinger, a new γ spectrometry system based on two HPGe detectors, which are surrounded by active and passive shieldings and placed 12 m underground, has been set up in the Ionizing Radiation Laboratory of the University of Salamanca. In this work, the Mazinger's performance is studied at the full energy range useful for natural radionuclides. In composite detectors, energy resolution is a consequence of the electronics adjustments, which have to enable the raw spectra to be summed without resolution worsening. Therefore, the method used to set up electronics and add spectra is described. Detector background is also analysed and compared with the one of a single low-background HPGe detector as a function of the different shielding elements, obtaining gross values of order 10 −4 cps. Efficiency and figure of merit are obtained for the main natural radionuclides in marine sediments belonging to the Mediterranean MD99-2348 core. Special focus is made on the 230 Th determination whose results are compared with the ones provided by α spectrometry. Results show that Mazinger´s performance, in terms of figure of merit, is four times better than the one of a low-level background HPGe detector, specially suited to detect natural radionuclides, being comparable to the performance of α spectrometry in the 230 Th determination, which is the radionuclide of lower γ intensity, and doing Mazinger a first class in radiometry of natural radionuclides.

This is a Reply to the Comment from F. Cinti and M. Boninsegni on our recent work on the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) phase transition in a two-dimensional dipolar system [Bombín, Mazzanti, and Boronat, Phys. Rev. A 100, 063614 (2019)]. The main criticism about our work expressed in that Comment is that we did not explicitly report the two spatial contributions to the total superfluid fraction. Here we analyze our results for a point of the phase diagram corresponding to the stripe phase, close to the gas-to-stripe transition line, and for a temperature below the BKT critical temperature. The scaling with the system size of the contribution to the superfluid fraction, coming from the direction in which spatial order appears, shows that it remains finite in the thermodynamic limit, as we already stated in our original work. This allow us to state that the stripe phase is superfluid at low temperatures. Furthermore, we offer some comments that help to understand where the differences between the results of Cinti and Boninsegni and ours come from., This work has been supported by the Ministerio de Economia, Industria y Competitividad (MINECO, Spain), under Grant No. FIS2017-84114-C2-1-P.

A two-dimensional quantum system of dipoles, with a polarization angle not perpendicular to the plane, shows a transition from a gas to a stripe phase. We have studied the thermal properties of these two phases using the path-integral Monte Carlo (PIMC) method. By simulating the thermal density matrix, PIMC provides exact results for magnitudes of interest such as the superfluid fraction and the one-body density matrix. As it is well known, in two dimensions the superfluid-to-normal phase transition follows the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) scenario. Our results show that both the anisotropic gas and the stripe phases follow the BKT scaling laws. At fixed density and increasing the tilting angle, the transition temperature decreases in going from the gas to the stripe phase. Superfluidity in the perpendicular direction to the stripes is rather small close to the critical temperature but it becomes larger at lower temperatures, mainly close to the transition to the gas. Our results are in qualitative agreement with the supersolidity observed recently in a quasi-one-dimensional array of dipolar droplets.

Dipolar quantum droplets are exotic quantum objects that are self-bound due to the subtle balance of attraction, repulsion, and quantum correlations. Here we present a systematic study of the critical atom number of these self-bound droplets, comparing the experimental results with extended mean-field Gross-Pitaevskii equation and quantum Monte Carlo simulations of the dilute system. The respective theoretical predictions differ, questioning the validity of the current theoretical state-of-the-art description of quantum droplets within the extended Gross-Pitaevskii equation framework and indicating that correlations in the system are significant. Furthermore, we show that our system can serve as a sensitive testing ground for many-body theories in the near future.

We study a two-component mixture of fermionic dipoles in two dimensions at zero temperature, interacting via a purely repulsive $1/r^3$ potential. This model can be realized with ultracold atoms or molecules, when their dipole moments are aligned in the confinement direction orthogonal to the plane. We characterize the unpolarized mixture by means of the Diffusion Monte Carlo technique. Computing the equation of state, we identify the regime of validity for a mean-field theory based on a low-density expansion and compare our results with the hard-disk model of repulsive fermions. At high density, we address the possibility of itinerant ferromagnetism, namely whether the ground state can be fully polarized in the fluid phase. Within the fixed-node approximation, we show that the accuracy of Jastrow-Slater trial wave functions, even with the typical two-body backflow correction, is not sufficient to resolve the relevant energy differences. By making use of the iterative-backflow improved trial wave functions, we observe no signature of a fully-polarized ground state up to the freezing density., Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures

We study the superfluid properties of a system of fully polarized dipolar bosons moving in the $XY$ plane. We focus on the general case where the polarization field forms an arbitrary angle $\ensuremath{\alpha}$ with respect to the $Z$ axis, while the system is still stable. We use the diffusion Monte Carlo and the path integral ground state methods to evaluate the one-body density matrix and the superfluid fractions in the region of the phase diagram where the system forms stripes. Despite its oscillatory behavior, the presence of a finite large-distance asymptotic value in the $s$-wave component of the one-body density matrix indicates the existence of a Bose condensate. The superfluid fraction along the stripes direction is always close to 1, while in the $Y$ direction decreases to a small value that is nevertheless different from zero. These two facts confirm that the stripe phase of the dipolar Bose system is a clear candidate for an intrinsic supersolid without the presence of defects as described by the Andreev-Lifshitz mechanism.

We study the repulsive polaron problem in a two-component two-dimensional system of fermionic atoms. We use two different interaction models: a short-range (hard-disk) potential and a dipolar potential. In our approach, all the atoms have the same mass and we consider the system to be composed of a uniform bath of a single species and a single atomic impurity. We use the diffusion Monte Carlo method to evaluate polaron properties such as its chemical potential and pair distribution functions, together with a discussion on the deficit of volume induced by the impurity.We also evaluate observables that allow us to determine the validity of the quasiparticle picture: the quasiparticle residue and the effective mass of the polaron. Employing two different potentials allows us to identify the universality regime, where the properties depend only on the gas parameter na2s fixed by the bath density and the two-dimensional scattering length.