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arXiv:1707.03149 · Physical Review A

Enhancing the Efimov correlation in Bose polarons with large mass imbalance

Mingyuan Sun, Xiaoling Cui

Published Aug 21, 2017• 25 citations
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Abstract

We study the effect of Efimov physics (in the few-body sector) on the spectral response of the Bose polaron, a many-body system consisting of an impurity immersed in a bath of bosonic atoms. We find that the Efimov correlation can be greatly enhanced by increasing the mass ratio between the bosons and the impurity, which results in visible signatures in the rf spectrum of the polaron. Using a diagrammatic approach up to the third-order virial expansion, we show how the mass imbalance and the enhanced three-body effect modify the line shape and linewidth of the polaron spectrum. Moreover, we study the effect of a finite boson-boson interaction on the spectrum. Taking the realistic system of Li impurities immersed in Cs bosons with a positive Cs-Cs scattering length, we find a visible Efimov branch, which is associated with the second lowest Efimov trimer, in the polaron spectrum. In particular, by adjusting the boson density the Efimov branch can greatly hybridize with the attractive polaron branch, leading to spectrum broadening near their avoided level crossing. Our results can be directly probed in the cold atoms experiments on Li-Cs and Li-Rb Bose polarons.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.96.022707

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We study the effect of Efimov physics (in the few-body sector) on the spectral response of the Bose polaron, a many-body system consisting of an impurity immersed in a bath of bosonic atoms. We find that the Efimov correlation can be greatly enhanced by increasing the mass ratio between the bosons and the impurity, which results in visible signatures in the rf spectrum of the polaron. Using a diagrammatic approach up to the third-order virial expansion, we show how the mass imbalance and the enhanced three-body effect modify the line shape and linewidth of the polaron spectrum. Moreover, we study the effect of a finite boson-boson interaction on the spectrum. Taking the realistic system of Li impurities immersed in Cs bosons with a positive Cs-Cs scattering length, we find a visible Efimov branch, which is associated with the second lowest Efimov trimer, in the polaron spectrum. In particular, by adjusting the boson density the Efimov branch can greatly hybridize with the attractive polaron branch, leading to spectrum broadening near their avoided level crossing. Our results can be directly probed in the cold atoms experiments on Li-Cs and Li-Rb Bose polarons.
The Bose polaron is a quasiparticle of an impurity dressed by surrounding bosons. In few-body physics, it is known that two identical bosons and a third distinguishable particle can form a sequence of Efimov bound states in the vicinity of interspecies scattering resonance. On the other hand, in the Bose polaron system with an impurity atom embedded in many bosons, no signature of Efimov physics has been reported in the existing spectroscopy measurements to date. In this Letter, we propose that a large mass imbalance between a light impurity and heavy bosons can help produce visible signatures of Efimov physics in such a spectroscopy measurement. Using the diagrammatic approach in the virial expansion to include three-body effects from pair-wise interactions, we determine the impurity self-energy and its spectral function. Taking the ^{6}Li-^{133}Cs system as a concrete example, we find two visible Efimov branches in the polaron spectrum, as well as their hybridizations with the attractive polaron branch. We also discuss the general scenarios for observing the signature of Efimov physics in polaron systems. This work paves the way for experimentally exploring intriguing few-body correlations in a many-body system in the near future.
Since the Efimov effect was introduced in 1970, a detailed theoretical understanding of Efimov physics has been developed in the few-body context. However, it has proven to be challenging to describe the role Efimov-type correlations play in many-body systems such as quenched or collapsing Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs). To study the impact the Efimov effect can have in such scenarios, we consider a light impurity immersed in a weakly interacting BEC, forming a Bose polaron. In this case, the higher-order correlations are localized around the impurity, making it more feasible to develop a theoretical description. Specifically, we employ a Gaussian state variational Ansatz in the reference frame of the impurity, capable of both capturing the Efimov effect and the formation of the polaron cloud. We find that the Efimov effect leads to a cooperative binding of bosons to the impurity and the formation of a many-body bound state. As a result, the polaron is not the ground state, but rendered a metastable excited state which can decay into these Efimov clusters. While this decay is slow for small interaction strengths, it becomes more prominent as the attractive scattering length increases, up to the point where the polaron becomes completely unstable. This critical scattering length can be interpreted as a many-body shifted Efimov resonance, where the scattering of two excitations of the bath with the polaron can lead to bound state formation. Compared to the few-body case, the resonance is shifted to smaller attractive scattering lengths due to the participation of the polaron cloud in the cooperative binding process. This corresponds to an intriguing scenario of polaron-assisted chemistry, where many-body effects lead to enhanced signal of the chemical recombination process, which can be directly probed in state-of-the-art experiments.
Motivated by recent experiments on $^{6}\mathrm{Li}\text{\ensuremath{-}}^{133}\mathrm{Cs}$ atomic mixtures with high mass imbalance, we study the Efimov correlation in an atomic system of two heavy bosons (133Cs^{133}\mathrm{Cs}133Cs) immersed in a bath of light fermions (6Li^{6}\mathrm{Li}6Li). Using the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, we identify two different regimes, depending on the Fermi momentum of light fermions (kF{k}_{F}kF​) and the boson-fermion scattering length as(<0){a}_{s}(<0)as​(<0), where the presence of an underlying Fermi sea plays distinct roles in the Efimov-type binding of bosons. Namely, in the regime ${k}_{F}|{a}_{s}|\ensuremath{\lesssim}1$ (${k}_{F}|{a}_{s}|\ensuremath{\gtrsim}1$), the Fermi sea induces an attractive (repulsive) effective interaction between bosons and thus favors (disfavors) the formation of a bound state, which can be seen as an Efimov trimer dressed by a fermion cloud. Interestingly, this implies nonmonotonic behavior of these bound states as increasing the fermion density (or kF{k}_{F}kF​). Moreover, we establish a generalized universal scaling law for the emergence and variation of such dressed Efimov bound states when incorporating a new scale (kF{k}_{F}kF​) brought on by the Fermi sea. These results can be directly tested in Li-Cs cold-atom experiments by measuring the modified bound-state spectrum and the shifted Efimov resonance, which manifest an emergent nontrivial Efimov correlation in a fermionic many-body environment.
By means of quantum Monte Carlo methods we calculate the binding energy of an impurity immersed in a Bose-Einstein condensate at T=0T=0T=0. The focus is on the attractive branch of the Bose polaron and on the role played by the mass imbalance between the impurity and the surrounding particles. For an impurity resonantly coupled to the bath, we investigate the dependence of the binding energy on the mass ratio and on the interaction strength within the medium. In particular, we determine the equation of state in the case of a static (infinite mass) impurity, where three-body correlations are irrelevant and the result is expected to be a universal function of the gas parameter. For the mass ratio corresponding to 40K^{40}\mathrm{K}40K impurities in a gas of 87Rb^{87}\mathrm{Rb}87Rb atoms, we provide an explicit comparison with the experimental findings of a recent study carried out at JILA.
We investigate the zero-temperature properties of an impurity particle interacting with a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), using a variational wave function that includes up to two Bogoliubov excitations of the BEC. This allows one to capture three-body Efimov physics, as well as to recover the first nontrivial terms in the weak-coupling expansion. We show that the energy and quasiparticle residue of the dressed impurity (polaron) are significantly lowered by three-body correlations, even for weak interactions where there is no Efimov trimer state in a vacuum. For increasing attraction between the impurity and the BEC, we observe a smooth crossover from atom to Efimov trimer, with a superposition of states near the Efimov resonance. We furthermore demonstrate that three-body loss does not prohibit the experimental observation of these effects. Our results thus suggest a route to realizing Efimov physics in a stable quantum many-body system for the first time.
An impurity immersed in a Bose condensate can form a quasiparticle known as a Bose polaron. When the impurity-boson interaction is short ranged and three-body Efimov correlations are neglected, the quasiparticle properties can be characterized in terms of the impurity-boson scattering length a IB and the condensate coherence length ξ . This description remains valid irrespective of the bath density n 0 . Long-ranged interactions—such as provided by Rydberg or ionic impurities—introduce an effective interaction range r eff as the third length scale. The interplay among these competing length scales raises the question of whether a robust description across different bath densities can still be maintained. In this study, we discuss the quasiparticle nature of long-range impurities and its dependence on the length scales n 0 − 1 / 3 , r eff , and ξ . We employ two complementary theories—the coherent-state ansatz and the perturbative Gross-Pitaevskii theory—which incorporate beyond-Fröhlich interactions. We derive an analytical expression for the beyond-Fröhlich effective mass for a contact interaction and numerically compute the effective mass for long-range impurities. We argue that the coupling parameter | a IB | n 0 1 / 3 remains the principal parameter governing the properties of the polaron. For weak ( | a IB | n 0 1 / 3 ≪ 1 ) and intermediate ( | a IB | n 0 1 / 3 ≃ 1 ) values of the coupling parameter, long-range impurities in a Bose condensate are well described as quasiparticles with a finite quasiparticle weight and a well-defined effective mass. However, the quasiparticle weight becomes significantly suppressed as the effective impurity volume is occupied by an increasing number of bath particles ( r eff n 0 1 / 3 ≫ 1 ).