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arXiv:1403.6588 · Physical Review A

Bipolarons and multipolarons consisting of impurity atoms in a Bose-Einstein condensate

Wim Casteels, Jacques Tempere, J. T. Devreese

Published Jul 9, 2013• 53 citations
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Abstract

The variational Feynman formalism for the polaron, extended to an all-coupling treatment of bipolarons, is applied for two impurity atoms in a Bose-Einstein condensate. This shows that if the polaronic coupling strength is large enough, the impurities will form a bound state (the bipolaron). As a function of the mutual repulsion between the impurities, two types of bipolaron are distinguished: a tightly bound bipolaron at weak repulsion and a dumbbell bipolaron at strong repulsion. Apart from the binding energy, the evolution of the bipolaron radius and its effective mass are also examined as a function of the strength of the repulsive interaction between the impurities and of the polaronic coupling strength. We then apply the strong-coupling formalism to multiple-impurity atoms in a condensate, which leads to the prediction of multipolaron formation in the strong-coupling regime. The results of the two formalisms are compared for two impurities in a condensate, which results in a general qualitative agreement and a quantitative agreement at strong coupling. Typically, the system of impurity atoms in a Bose-Einstein condensate is expected to exhibit the polaronic weak-coupling regime. However, the polaronic coupling strength is, in principle, tunable with a Feshbach resonance.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.88.013613

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The variational Feynman formalism for the polaron, extended to an all-coupling treatment of bipolarons, is applied for two impurity atoms in a Bose-Einstein condensate. This shows that if the polaronic coupling strength is large enough, the impurities will form a bound state (the bipolaron). As a function of the mutual repulsion between the impurities, two types of bipolaron are distinguished: a tightly bound bipolaron at weak repulsion and a dumbbell bipolaron at strong repulsion. Apart from the binding energy, the evolution of the bipolaron radius and its effective mass are also examined as a function of the strength of the repulsive interaction between the impurities and of the polaronic coupling strength. We then apply the strong-coupling formalism to multiple-impurity atoms in a condensate, which leads to the prediction of multipolaron formation in the strong-coupling regime. The results of the two formalisms are compared for two impurities in a condensate, which results in a general qualitative agreement and a quantitative agreement at strong coupling. Typically, the system of impurity atoms in a Bose-Einstein condensate is expected to exhibit the polaronic weak-coupling regime. However, the polaronic coupling strength is, in principle, tunable with a Feshbach resonance.
Mobile impurities in a Bose-Einstein condensate form quasiparticles called polarons. Here, we show that two such polarons can bind to form a bound bipolaron state. Its emergence is caused by an induced nonlocal interaction mediated by density oscillations in the condensate, and we derive using field theory an effective Schrödinger equation describing this for an arbitrarily strong impurity-boson interaction. We furthermore compare with quantum Monte Carlo simulations finding remarkable agreement, which underlines the predictive power of the developed theory. It is found that bipolaron formation typically requires strong impurity interactions beyond the validity of more commonly used weak-coupling approaches that lead to local Yukawa-type interactions. We predict that the bipolarons are observable in present experiments, and we describe a procedure to probe their properties.
We address the Bose polaron problem of a mobile impurity interacting strongly with a host Bose-Einstein condensate through a Feshbach resonance. On the repulsive side at strong couplings, theoretical approaches predict two distinct polaron branches corresponding to attractive and repulsive polarons, but it remains unclear how the two are related. This is partly due to the challenges resulting from a competition of strongly attractive (destabilizing) impurity-boson interactions with weakly repulsive (stabilizing) boson-boson interactions, whose interplay is difficult to describe with contemporary theoretical methods. Here, we develop a powerful variational framework that combines Gaussian correlations among impurity-boson scattering states, including up to an infinite number of bosonic excitations, with exact non-Gaussian correlations among bosons occupying an impurity-boson bound state. This variational scheme enables a full treatment of strong nonlinearities arising in the Feshbach molecule on the repulsive side of the resonance. Within this framework, we demonstrate that the interplay of impurity-induced instability and stabilization by repulsive boson-boson interactions results in a discrete set of metastable many-body bound states at intermediate energies between the attractive and repulsive polaron branches. These states exhibit strong quantum statistical characteristics in the form of non-Gaussian quantum correlations, requiring nonperturbative beyond mean-field treatments for their characterization. Furthermore, these many-body bound states have sizable molecular spectral weights, accessible via molecular spectroscopy techniques. This work provides a unified theory of attractive and repulsive Bose polarons on the repulsive side of the Feshbach resonance.
An impurity particle interacting with a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) leads to the formation of a quasiparticle known as the Bose polaron. We investigate the properties of the two-dimensional Bose polaron, applying a variational ansatz that contains up to three Bogoliubov excitations of the BEC. Similar to its three-dimensional counterpart, we observe the existence of two quasiparticle branches, namely, the attractive and the repulsive polarons, at different coupling strengths. We find that their energies agree well with recent quantum Monte Carlo calculations. In particular, we observe that the inclusion of three excitations is crucial to capture the attractive polaron energy towards the regime of strong attraction, where the quasiparticle properties are dominated by few-body correlations. We also calculate the attractive polaron effective mass and residue, where we find significant differences between considering a weakly interacting Bose medium and taking the noninteracting limit, signaling enhanced impurity dressing by excitations in the latter case. By contrast, the spectral weight of the metastable repulsive polaron is largely insensitive to the interactions in the BEC and the number of Bogoliubov excitations. Our model may be experimentally realized in dilute atomic vapors and atomically thin semiconductors.
Bose polarons, quasiparticles composed of mobile impurities surrounded by cold Bose gas, can experience strong interactions mediated by the many-body environment and form bipolaron bound states. Here we present a detailed study of heavy polarons in a one-dimensional Bose gas by formulating a nonperturbative theory and complementing it with exact numerical simulations. We develop an analytic approach for weak boson-boson interactions and arbitrarily strong impurity-boson couplings. Our approach is based on a mean-field theory that accounts for deformations of the superfluid by the impurities and in this way minimizes quantum fluctuations. The mean-field equations are solved exactly in the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, leading to an analytic expression for the interaction potential of heavy polarons, which is found to be in excellent agreement with quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) results. In the strong coupling limit, the potential substantially deviates from the exponential form valid for weak coupling and has a linear shape at short distances. Taking into account the leading-order Born-Huang corrections, we calculate bipolaron binding energies for impurity-boson mass ratios as low as 3 and find excellent agreement with QMC results.
The weak-coupling many-polaron formalism is applied to the case of the polaronic system consisting of impurities in a Bose-Einstein condensate. This allows investigating the ground-state properties and the response of the system to Bragg spectroscopy. Then, this theory is applied to the system of spin-polarized fermionic lithium-6 impurities in a sodium condensate. The Bragg spectrum reveals a peak that corresponds to the emission of Bogoliubov excitations. Both the ground-state properties and the response spectrum show that the polaronic effect vanishes at high densities. We also look at two possibilities to define the polaronic effective mass and observe that this results in a different quantitative behavior if multiple impurities are involved.
We use a class of variational wave functions to study the properties of an impurity in a Bose-Einstein condensate, i.e., the Bose polaron. The impurity interacts with the condensate through a contact interaction, which can be tuned by a Feshbach resonance. We find a stable attractive polaron branch that evolves continuously across the resonance to a tight-binding diatomic molecule deep in the positive scattering length side. A repulsive polaron branch with finite lifetime is also observed and it becomes unstable as the interaction strength increases. The effective mass of the attractive polaron also changes smoothly across the resonance connecting the two well-understood limits deep on both sides.