No Arabic abstract
The emergence of quasiparticles in strongly interacting matter represents one of the cornerstones of modern physics. However, when different phases of matter compete near a quantum critical point, the very existence of quasiparticles comes under question. Here we create Bose polarons near quantum criticality by immersing atomic impurities in a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) with near-resonant interactions. Using locally-resolved radiofrequency spectroscopy, we probe the energy, spectral width, and short-range correlations of the impurities as a function of temperature. Far below the superfluid critical temperature, the impurities form well-defined quasiparticles. However, their inverse lifetime, given by their spectral width, is observed to increase linearly with temperature at the Planckian scale $frac{k_B T}{hbar}$, a hallmark of quantum critical behavior. Close to the BEC critical temperature, the spectral width exceeds the binding energy of the impurities, signaling a breakdown of the quasiparticle picture.
We study the ground state properties and nonequilibrium dynamics of two spinor bosonic impurities immersed in a one-dimensional bosonic gas upon applying an interspecies interaction quench. For the ground state of two non-interacting impurities we reveal signatures of attractive induced interactions in both cases of attractive or repulsive interspecies interactions, while a weak impurity-impurity repulsion forces the impurities to stay apart. Turning to the quench dynamics we inspect the time-evolution of the contrast unveiling the existence, dynamical deformation and the orthogonality catastrophe of Bose polarons. We find that for an increasing postquench repulsion the impurities reside in a superposition of two distinct two-body configurations while at strong repulsions their corresponding two-body correlation patterns show a spatially delocalized behavior evincing the involvement of higher excited states. For attractive interspecies couplings, the impurities exhibit a tendency to localize at the origin and remarkably for strong attractions they experience a mutual attraction on the two-body level that is imprinted as a density hump on the bosonic bath.
We investigate the crossover of the impurity-induced dynamics, in trapped one-dimensional Bose polarons subject to radio frequency (rf) pulses of varying intensity, from an adiabatic to a diabatic regime. Utilizing adiabatic pulses for either weak repulsive or attractive impurity-medium interactions, a multitude of polaronic excitations or mode-couplings of the impurity-bath interaction with the collective breathing motion of the bosonic medium are spectrally resolved. We find that for strongly repulsive impurity-bath interactions, a temporal orthogonality catastrophe manifests in resonances in the excitation spectra where impurity coherence vanishes. When two impurities are introduced, impurity-impurity correlations, for either attractive or strong repulsive couplings, induce a spectral shift of the resonances with respect to the single impurity. For a heavy impurity, the polaronic peak is accompanied by a series of equidistant side-band resonances, related to interference of the impurity spin dynamics and the sound waves of the bath. In all cases, we enter the diabatic transfer regime for an increasing bare Rabi frequency of the rf field with a Lorentzian spectral shape featuring a single polaronic resonance. The findings in this work on the effects of external trap, rf pulse and impurity-impurity interaction should have implications for the new generations of cold-atom experiments.
The mobile impurity in a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) is a paradigmatic many-body problem. For weak interaction between the impurity and the BEC, the impurity deforms the BEC only slightly and it is well described within the Frohlich model and the Bogoliubov approximation. For strong local attraction this standard approach, however, fails to balance the local attraction with the weak repulsion between the BEC particles and predicts an instability where an infinite number of bosons is attracted toward the impurity. Here we present a solution of the Bose polaron problem beyond the Bogoliubov approximation which includes the local repulsion between bosons and thereby stabilizes the Bose polaron even near and beyond the scattering resonance. We show that the Bose polaron energy remains bounded from below across the resonance and the size of the polaron dressing cloud stays finite. Our results demonstrate how the dressing cloud replaces the attractive impurity potential with an effective many-body potential that excludes binding. We find that at resonance, including the effects of boson repulsion, the polaron energy depends universally on the effective range. Moreover, while the impurity contact is strongly peaked at positive scattering length, it remains always finite. Our solution highlights how Bose polarons are self-stabilized by repulsion, providing a mechanism to understand quench dynamics and nonequilibrium time evolution at strong coupling.
We have measured the quantum depletion of an interacting homogeneous Bose-Einstein condensate, and confirmed the 70-year old theory of N.N. Bogoliubov. The observed condensate depletion is reversibly tuneable by changing the strength of the interparticle interactions. Our atomic homogeneous condensate is produced in an optical-box trap, the interactions are tuned via a magnetic Feshbach resonance, and the condensed fraction probed by coherent two-photon Bragg scattering.
Quantum fluctuations are the origin of genuine quantum many-body effects, and can be neglected in classical mean-field phenomena. Here we report on the observation of stable quantum droplets containing $sim$ 800 atoms which are expected to collapse at the mean-field level due to the essentially attractive interaction. By systematic measurements on individual droplets we demonstrate quantitatively that quantum fluctuations stabilize them against the mean-field collapse. We observe in addition interference of several droplets indicating that this stable many-body state is phase coherent.