Polarons and dimerons in the two-dimensional attractive Hubbard model

A two-dimensional (2D) spin-up ideal Fermi gas interacting attractively with a spin-down impurity in the continuum undergoes, at zero temperature, a first-order phase transition from a polaron to a dimeron state. Here, we study a similar system on a square lattice, by considering the attractive 2D Fermi-Hubbard model with a single spin-down and a finite filling fraction of spin-up fermions. We study polaron and dimeron quasi-particle properties via variational ansatz up to one particle-hole excitation. Moreover, we develop a determinant diagrammatic Monte Carlo algorithm for this problem based on expansion in bare on-site coupling U. This algorithm turns out to be sign-problem free at any filling of spin-up fermions, allowing one to sample very high diagram order (larger than 200 in our study) and to do simulations for large U/t (we go up to U/t=-20 with t the hopping strength). Both methods give qualitatively consistent results. With variational ansatz we go to even larger on-site attraction. At very low spin-up filling fraction, we observe the polaron-to-dimeron transition, in agreement with the continuum case. Upon increasing the filling fraction, however, the transition shifts to higher values of |U|/t and the transition disappears beyond a filling fraction of about 20%. In this region, the polaron state always gives a lower energy and has a finite quasi-particle residue. Our findings are directly relevant to cold atom experiments with 2D optical lattices: a small and finite density of spin-down impurities in the ground state will form a superfluid at strong coupling at low spin-up filling fraction. Above some critical spin-up filling fraction, the system is expected to remain a normal Fermi liquid, even in the strong-coupling limit.