No Arabic abstract
Recently, two independent experiments reported the observation of long-lived polarons in a Bose-Einstein condensate, providing an excellent setting to study the generic scenario of a mobile impurity interacting with a quantum reservoir. Here, we expand the experimental analysis by disentangling the effects of trap inhomogeneities and the many-body continuum in one of these experiments. This makes it possible to extract the energy of the polaron at a well-defined density as a function of the interaction strength. Comparisons with quantum Monte-Carlo as well as diagrammatic calculations show good agreement, and provide a more detailed picture of the polaron properties at stronger interactions than previously possible. Moreover, we develop a semi-classical theory for the motional dynamics and three-body loss of the polarons, which partly explains a previously unresolved discrepancy between theory and experimental observations for repulsive interactions. Finally, we utilize quantum Monte-Carlo calculations to demonstrate that the findings reported in the two experiments are consistent with each other.
We study the lifetime of a Bose gas at and around unitarity using a Feshbach resonance in lithium~7. At unitarity, we measure the temperature dependence of the three-body decay coefficient $L_{3}$. Our data follow a $L_3 {=} lambda_{3} / T^{2}$ law with $lambda_{3} = 2.5(3)_{stat}_(6)_{sys} 10^{-20} (mu K)^2 cm^6 s^{-1}$ and are in good agreement with our analytical result based on the zero-range theory. Varying the scattering length $a$ at fixed temperature, we investigate the crossover between the finite-temperature unitary region and the previously studied regime where $|a|$ is smaller than the thermal wavelength. We find that $L_{3}$ is continuous across resonance, and over the whole $a {<} 0$ range our data quantitatively agree with our calculation.
The presence of strong interactions in a many-body quantum system can lead to a variety of exotic effects. Here we show that even in a comparatively simple setup consisting of a charged impurity in a weakly interacting bosonic medium the competition of length scales gives rise to a highly correlated mesoscopic state. Using quantum Monte Carlo simulations, we unravel its vastly different polaronic properties compared to neutral quantum impurities. Moreover, we identify a transition between the regime amenable to conventional perturbative treatment in the limit of weak atom-ion interactions and a many-body bound state with vanishing quasi-particle residue composed of hundreds of atoms. In order to analyze the structure of the corresponding states we examine the atom-ion and atom-atom correlation functions which both show nontrivial properties. Our findings are directly relevant to experiments using hybrid atom-ion setups that have recently attained the ultracold regime.
We study the Bose-polaron problem in a nonequilibrium setting, by considering an impurity embedded in a quantum fluid of light realized by exciton-polaritons in a microcavity, subject to a coherent drive and dissipation on account of pump and cavity losses. We obtain the polaron effective mass, the drag force acting on the impurity, and determine polaron trajectories at a semiclassical level. We find different dynamical regimes, originating from the unique features of the excitation spectrum of driven-dissipative polariton fluids, in particular a non-trivial regime of motion against the flow. Our work promotes the study of impurity dynamics as an alternative testbed for probing superfluidity in quantum fluids of light.
We present a theoretical study based upon quantum Monte Carlo methods of the Bose polaron in one-dimensional systems with contact interactions. In this instance of the problem of a single impurity immersed in a quantum bath, the medium is a Lieb-Liniger gas of bosons ranging from the weakly interacting to the Tonks-Girardeau regime, whereas the impurity is coupled to the bath via a different contact potential producing both repulsive and attractive interactions. Both the case of a mobile impurity, having the same mass as the particles in the medium, and of a static impurity with infinite mass are considered. We make use of exact numerical techniques that allow us to calculate the ground-state energy of the impurity, its effective mass as well as the contact parameter between the impurity and the bath. These quantities are investigated as a function of the strength of interactions between the impurity and the bath and within the bath. In particular, we find that the effective mass rapidly increases to very large values when the impurity gets strongly coupled to an otherwise weakly repulsive bath. This heavy impurity hardly moves within the medium, thereby realizing the self-localization regime of the Landau-Pekar polaron. Furthermore, we compare our results with predictions of perturbation theory valid for weak interactions and with exact solutions available when the bosons in the medium behave as impenetrable particles.
The notion of a polaron, originally introduced in the context of electrons in ionic lattices, helps us to understand how a quantum impurity behaves when being immersed in and interacting with a many-body background. We discuss the impact of the impurities on the medium particles by considering feedback effects from polarons that can be realized in ultracold quantum gas experiments. In particular, we exemplify the modifications of the medium in the presence of either Fermi or Bose polarons. Regarding Fermi polarons we present a corresponding many-body diagrammatic approach operating at finite temperatures and discuss how mediated two- and three-body interactions are implemented within this framework. Utilizing this approach, we analyze the behavior of the spectral function of Fermi polarons at finite temperature by varying impurity-medium interactions as well as spatial dimensions from three to one. Interestingly, we reveal that the spectral function of the medium atoms could be a useful quantity for analyzing the transition/crossover from attractive polarons to molecules in three-dimensions. As for the Bose polaron, we showcase the depletion of the background Bose-Einstein condensate in the vicinity of the impurity atom. Such spatial modulations would be important for future investigations regarding the quantification of interpolaron correlations in Bose polaron problems.