Dynamics of polaron formation in 1D Bose gases in the strong-coupling regime

We discuss the interaction of a mobile quantum impurity with a Bose-Einstein condensate of atoms at finite temperature. To describe the resulting Bose polaron formation we extend the dynamical variational approach of [Phys.Rev.Lett. 117, 11302 (2016)] to an initial thermal gas of Bogoliubov phonons. We study the polaron formation after switching on the interaction, e.g., by a radio-frequency (RF) pulse from a non-interacting to an interacting state. To treat also the strongly...

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 ...

The temperature dependence of a mobile impurity in a dilute Bose gas, the Bose polaron, is investigated for wide a range of impurity-bath interactions. Using a diagrammatic resummation scheme designed to include scattering processes important at finite temperature $T$, we show that the phase transition of the environment to a Bose-Einstein condensate at the critical temperature $T_c$ leads to several non-trivial effects. The attractive polaron present at $T=0$ fragments into ...

We investigate the non-equilibrium dynamics of an impurity coupled to a Bose-Einstein condensate, systematically compared with recent experimental results [M. G. Skou et al., Nat. Phys. (2021)]. The dynamics of the impurity is tracked down by using a time-dependent variational coherent ansatz. For weak coupling between the impurity and the bath, analytical expressions for the time-dependent overlap (or contrast) are derived, matching quite well with previous findings obtained...

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 Fr\"ohlich 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 ...

The Fermi-polaron problem of a mobile impurity interacting with fermionic medium emerges in various contexts, ranging from the foundations of Landau's Fermi-liquid theory to electron-exciton interaction in semiconductors, to unusual properties of high-temperature superconductors. While classically the medium provides only a dissipative environment to the impurity, quantum picture of polaronic dressing is more intricate and arises from the interplay of few- and many-body aspec...

Grusdt et al. [New J. Phys. 19, 103035 (2017)] recently made a renormalization group study of a one-dimensional Bose polaron in cold atoms. Their study went beyond the usual Frohlich description, which includes only single-phonon processes, by including two-phonon processes in which two phonons are simultaneously absorbed or emitted during impurity scattering [Shchadilova et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 117, 113002 (2016)]. We study this same beyond-Frohlich model, but in the static ...

We study the non-equilibrium dynamics of an impurity in an harmonic trap that is kicked with a well-defined quasi-momentum, and interacts with a bath of free fermions or interacting bosons in a 1D lattice configuration. Using numerical and analytical techniques we investigate the full dynamics beyond linear response, which allows us to quantitatively characterise states of the impurity in the bath for different parameter regimes. These vary from a tightly bound molecular stat...

We study the dynamics of an impurity embedded in a trapped Bose-Einstein condensate (Bose polaron), by recalling the quantum Brownian motion model. It is crucial that the model considers a parabolic trapping potential to resemble the experimental conditions. Thus, we detail here how the formal derivation changes due to the gas trap, in comparison to the homogeneous gas. We first find that the presence of a gas trap leads to a new form of the bath-impurity coupling constant an...

We study the motion of a heavy impurity in a one-dimensional Bose gas. The impurity experiences the friction force due to scattering off thermally excited quasiparticles. We present detailed analysis of an arbitrarily strong impurity-boson coupling in a wide range of temperatures within a microscopic theory. Focusing mostly on weakly interacting bosons, we derive an analytical result for the friction force and uncover new regimes of the impurity dynamics. Particularly interes...