Imaging Magnetic Polarons in the Doped Fermi–Hubbard Model

Abstract

Polarons are among the most fundamental quasiparticles emerging in interacting many-body systems, forming already at the level of a single mobile dopant [1]. In the context of the two- dimensional Fermi-Hubbard model, such polarons are predicted to form around charged dopants in an antiferromagnetic background in the low doping regime close to the Mott insulating state [2–8]. Macroscopic transport and spectroscopy measurements related to high T c materials have yielded strong evidence for the existence of such quasiparticles in these systems [9, 10]. Here we report the first microscopic observation of magnetic polarons in a doped Fermi-Hubbard system, harnessing the full single-site spin and density resolution of our ultracold-atom quantum simulator. We reveal the dressing of mobile doublons by a local reduction and even sign reversal of magnetic correlations, originating from the competition between kinetic and magnetic energy in the system. The experimentally observed polaron signatures are found to be consistent with an effective string model at finite temperature [8]. We demonstrate that delocalization of the doublon is a necessary condition for polaron formation by contrasting this mobile setting to a scenario where the doublon is pinned to a lattice site. Our work paves the way towards probing interactions between polarons, which may lead to stripe formation, as well as microscopically exploring the fate of polarons in the pseudogap and bad metal phase.