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arXiv:1811.10702 · Physical Review Letters

Quench Dynamics and Orthogonality Catastrophe of Bose Polarons

S. I. Mistakidis, G. C. Katsimiga, Georgios M. Koutentakis, Thomas Busch, Peter Schmelcher

Published May 8, 2019• 111 citations
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Abstract

We monitor the correlated quench induced dynamical dressing of a spinor impurity repulsively interacting with a Bose-Einstein condensate. Inspecting the temporal evolution of the structure factor, three distinct dynamical regions arise upon increasing the interspecies interaction. These regions are found to be related to the segregated nature of the impurity and to the Ohmic character of the bath. It is shown that the impurity dynamics can be described by an effective potential that deforms from a harmonic to a double-well one when crossing the miscibility-immiscibility threshold. In particular, for miscible components the polaron formation is imprinted on the spectral response of the system. We further illustrate that for increasing interaction an orthogonality catastrophe occurs and the polaron picture breaks down. Then a dissipative motion of the impurity takes place leading to a transfer of energy to its environment. This process signals the presence of entanglement in the many-body system.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.122.183001

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We monitor the correlated quench induced dynamical dressing of a spinor impurity repulsively interacting with a Bose-Einstein condensate. Inspecting the temporal evolution of the structure factor, three distinct dynamical regions arise upon increasing the interspecies interaction. These regions are found to be related to the segregated nature of the impurity and to the Ohmic character of the bath. It is shown that the impurity dynamics can be described by an effective potential that deforms from a harmonic to a double-well one when crossing the miscibility-immiscibility threshold. In particular, for miscible components the polaron formation is imprinted on the spectral response of the system. We further illustrate that for increasing interaction an orthogonality catastrophe occurs and the polaron picture breaks down. Then a dissipative motion of the impurity takes place leading to a transfer of energy to its environment. This process signals the presence of entanglement in the many-body system.
Abstract We study the ground state properties and non-equilibrium 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.
Recent studies have demonstrated that higher than two-body bath-impurity correlations are not important for quantitatively describing the ground state of the Bose polaron. Motivated by the above, we employ the so-called Gross Ansatz (GA) approach to unravel the stationary and dynamical properties of the homogeneous one-dimensional Bose-polaron for different impurity momenta and bath-impurity couplings. We explicate that the character of the equilibrium state crossovers from the quasi-particle Bose polaron regime to the collective-excitation stationary dark-bright soliton for varying impurity momentum and interactions. Following an interspecies interaction quench the temporal orthogonality catastrophe is identified, provided that bath-impurity interactions are sufficiently stronger than the intraspecies bath ones, thus generalizing the results of the confined case. This catastrophe originates from the formation of dispersive shock wave structures associated with the zero-range character of the bath-impurity potential. For initially moving impurities, a momentum transfer process from the impurity to the dispersive shock waves via the exerted drag force is demonstrated, resulting in a final polaronic state with reduced velocity. Our results clearly demonstrate the crucial role of non-linear excitations for determining the behavior of the one-dimensional Bose polaron.
Abstract We unravel the nonequilibrium correlated quantum quench dynamics of an impurity traveling through a harmonically confined Bose–Einstein condensate in one-dimension. For weak repulsive interspecies interactions the impurity oscillates within the bosonic gas. At strong repulsions and depending on its prequench position the impurity moves towards an edge of the bosonic medium and subsequently equilibrates. This equilibration being present independently of the initial velocity, the position and the mass of the impurity is inherently related to the generation of entanglement in the many-body system. Focusing on attractive interactions the impurity performs a damped oscillatory motion within the bosonic bath, a behavior that becomes more evident for stronger attractions. To elucidate our understanding of the dynamics an effective potential picture is constructed. The effective mass of the emergent quasiparticle is measured and found to be generically larger than the bare one, especially for strong attractions. In all cases, a transfer of energy from the impurity to the bosonic medium takes place. Finally, by averaging over a sample of simulated in situ single-shot images we expose how the single-particle density distributions and the two-body interspecies correlations can be probed.
Advancing our understanding of non-equilibrium phenomena in quantum many-body systems remains one of the greatest challenges in physics. Here we report on the experimental observation of a paradigmatic many-body problem, namely the non-equilibrium dynamics of a quantum impurity immersed in a bosonic environment1,2. We use an interferometric technique to prepare coherent superposition states of atoms in a Bose–Einstein condensate with a small impurity-state component, and monitor the evolution of such quantum superpositions into polaronic quasiparticles. These results offer a systematic picture of polaron formation3–7 from weak to strong impurity interactions. They reveal three distinct regimes of evolution with dynamical transitions that provide a link between few-body processes and many-body dynamics. Our measurements reveal universal dynamical behaviour in interacting many-body systems and demonstrate new pathways to study non-equilibrium quantum phenomena. Quantum impurities immersed in a bosonic environment can evolve into polaronic quasiparticles, so-called polarons. Interferometric measurement reveals this transition, which involves three different regimes dominated by few-body and many-body dynamics.
We unravel the many-body dynamics of a harmonically trapped impurity colliding with a bosonic medium confined in a double well upon quenching the initially displaced harmonic trap to the center of the double well.We reveal that the emerging correlation dynamics crucially depends on the impurity-medium interaction strength allowing for a classification into different dynamical response regimes.For strong attractive impurity-medium couplings the impurity is bound to the bosonic bath, while for intermediate attractions it undergoes an effective tunneling.In the case of weak attractive or repulsive couplings the impurity penetrates the bosonic bath and performs a dissipative oscillatory motion.Further increasing the impurity-bath repulsion results in the pinning of the impurity between the density peaks of the bosonic medium, a phenomenon that is associated with a strong impurity-medium entanglement.For strong repulsions, the impurity is totally reflected by the bosonic medium.To unravel the underlying microscopic excitation processes accompanying the dynamics, we employ an effective potential picture.We extend our results to the case of two bosonic impurities and demonstrate the existence of a qualitatively similar impurity dynamics.
We theoretically investigate the stationary properties of a spin-1/2 impurity immersed in a one-dimensional confined Bose gas. In particular, we consider coherently coupled spin states with an external field, where only one spin component interacts with the bath, enabling light dressing of the impurity and spin-dependent bath-impurity interactions. Through detailed comparisons with ab-initio many-body simulations, we demonstrate that the composite system is accurately described by a simplified effective Hamiltonian. The latter builds upon previously developed effective potential approaches in the absence of light dressing. It can be used to extract the impurity energy, residue, effective mass, and anharmonicity induced by the phononic dressing. Light-dressing is shown to increase the polaron residue, undressing the impurity from phononic excitations because of strong spin coupling. For strong repulsions, previously shown to trigger dynamical Bose polaron decay (a phenomenon called temporal orthogonality catastrophe), it is explained that strong light-dressing stabilizes a repulsive polaron-dressed state. Our results establish the effective Hamiltonian framework as a powerful tool for exploring strongly interacting polaronic systems and corroborating forthcoming experimental realizations.