Many-body treatment of the collisional frequency shift in fermionic atoms

Phys Rev Lett. 2009 Dec 31;103(26):260402. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.103.260402. Epub 2009 Dec 22.

Abstract

Recent experiments have measured collisional frequency shifts in polarized fermionic alkaline-earth atoms using 1S0-3P0 Rabi spectroscopy. Here, we provide a first-principles nonequilibrium theoretical description of the interaction frequency shifts starting from the microscopic many-body Hamiltonian. Our formalism describes the dependence of the frequency shift on excitation inhomogeneity, interactions, temperature, and many-body dynamics, provides a fundamental understanding of the effects of the measurement process, and explains the observed density shift data.