Virtual phonons of a quantum liquid scatter off impurities and mediate a long-range interaction, analogous to the Casimir effect. In one dimension the effect is universal and the induced interaction decays as 1/r3, much slower than the van der Waals interaction ∼1/r6, where r is the impurity separation. The sign of the effect is characterized by the product of impurity-phonon scattering amplitudes, which take a universal form and have been seen to vanish for several integrable impurity models. Thus, if the impurity parameters can be independently tuned to lie on opposite sides of such integrable points, one can observe an attractive interaction turned into a repulsive one.
We study the interaction of two localized impurities in a repulsive one-dimensional Fermi liquid via bosonization. In a previous paper [Phys. Rev. A 72, 023616 (2005)], it was shown that at distances much larger than the interparticle spacing the impurities interact through a Casimir-type force mediated by the zero-sound phonons of the underlying quantum liquid. Here we extend these results and show that the strength and sign of this Casimir interaction depend sensitively on the impurity separation. These oscillations in the Casimir interaction have the same period as Friedel oscillations. Their maxima correspond to tunneling resonances tuned by the impurity separation.
We discuss the effective interactions between two localized perturbations in one-dimensional quantum liquids. For noninteracting fermions, the interactions exhibit Friedel oscillations, giving rise to a Ruderman-Kittel-Kasuya-Yosida-type interaction familiar from impurity spins in metals. In the interacting case, at low energies, a Luttinger-liquid description applies. In the case of repulsive fermions, the Friedel oscillations of the interacting system are replaced, at long distances, by a universal Casimir-type interaction which depends only on the sound velocity and decays inversely with the separation. The Casimir-type interaction between localized perturbations embedded in a fermionic environment gives rise to a long-range coupling between quantum dots in ultracold Fermi gases, opening an alternative to couple qubits with neutral atoms. We also briefly discuss the case of bosonic quantum liquids in which the interaction between weak impurities turns out to be short ranged, decaying exponentially on the scale of the healing length.
We consider an impurity in a semi-infinite one-dimensional system of weakly-interacting bosons. We calculate the interaction potential for the impurity due to the end of the system, i.e., the wall. For local repulsive (attractive) interaction between the impurity and the Bose gas, the interaction potential is attractive (repulsive). At short distances from the wall it decays exponentially crossing over into a universal
1/r2 behavior at separations
r above the healing length. Our results can also be interpreted as a Casimir-like interaction between two impurities, where one of them is infinitely strongly coupled to the Bose gas. We discuss various scenarios for the induced interaction between the impurities using the scattering approach. We finally address the phenomenon of localization of the impurity near the wall. In the paper we mainly study the case of a static impurity, however the universal
1/r2 interaction also holds for a slowly moving impurity.
We investigate the long-range behavior of the induced Casimir interaction between two spinless heavy impurities, or polarons, in superfluid cold atomic gases. With the help of effective field theory (EFT) of a Galilean invariant superfluid, we show that the induced impurity-impurity potential at long distance universally shows a relativistic van der Waals-like attraction (∼1/r^{7}) resulting from the exchange of two superfluid phonons. We also clarify finite temperature effects from the same two-phonon exchange process. The temperature T introduces the additional length scale c_{s}/T with the speed of sound c_{s}. Leading corrections at finite temperature scale as T^{6}/r for distances r≪c_{s}/T smaller than the thermal length. For larger distances the potential shows a nonrelativistic van der Waals behavior (∼T/r^{6}) instead of the relativistic one. Our EFT formulation applies not only to weakly coupled Bose or Fermi superfluids but also to those composed of strongly correlated unitary fermions with a weakly coupled impurity. The sound velocity controls the magnitude of the van der Waals potential, which we evaluate for the fermionic superfluid in the BCS-BEC crossover.
We study a one-dimensional interacting quantum liquid hosting a pair of mobile impurities causing backscattering. We determine the effective retarded interaction between the two impurities mediated by the liquid. We show that for strong backscattering this interaction gives rise to resonances and antiresonances in the finite-frequency mobility of the impurity pair. At the antiresonances, the two impurities remain at rest even when driven by a (small) external force. At the resonances, their synchronous motion follows the external drive in phase and reaches maximum amplitude. Using a perturbative renormalization group analysis in quantum tunneling across the impurities, we study the range of validity of our model. We predict that these mechanical antiresonances are observable in experiments on ultracold atom gases confined to one dimension.
We investigate the indirect interaction between two isolated impurities in a Luttinger liquid described by a microscopic lattice model. To treat the electron-electron interaction
U, the functional renormalization group method is used. For comparison, we also study the
U=0 case. We find that for a wide range of impurity parameters the impurity interaction
V12 as a function of their separation
r oscillates with decaying amplitude between being attractive and repulsive. For half-filling of the band and in a crossover regime between weak and strong impurities, the interaction becomes purely attractive. For
U=0 and independent of the impurity strength, the amplitude of the interaction energy falls off as
1∕r. For
U>0, the decay for small separations and weak to intermediate impurities is governed by a
U dependent exponent larger than $\ensuremath{-}1$, which crosses over to $\ensuremath{-}1$ for large
r. The crossover scale depends on the impurity strength and
U. We present simple pictures which explain our results in the limits of weak and strong impurities. We finally also consider attractive interactions
U<0.