Fermi polaron in a one-dimensional quasiperiodic optical lattice: The simplest many-body localization challenge

We theoretically investigate the behavior of a moving impurity immersed in a sea of fermionic atoms that are confined in a quasiperiodic (bichromatic) optical lattice within a standard variational approach. We consider both repulsive and attractive contact interactions for such a simple many-body localization problem of Fermi polarons. The variational approach enables us to access relatively large systems and therefore may be used to understand many-body localization in the thermodynamic limit. The energy and wave function of the polaron states are found to be strongly affected by the quasirandom lattice potential and their experimental measurements (i.e., via radio-frequency spectroscopy or quantum gas microscope) therefore provide a sensitive way to underpin the localization transition. We determine a phase diagram by calculating two critical quasirandom disorder strengths, which correspond to the onset of the localization of the ground-state polaron state and the many-body localization of all polaron states, respectively. Our predicted phase diagram could be straightforwardly examined in current cold-atom experiments.