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arXiv:2011.06385 · Physical Review A

Quench Dynamics of the Ideal Bose Polaron at Zero and Nonzero Temperatures

Moritz Drescher, Manfred Salmhofer B, Tilman Enss

Published Mar 19, 2021• 27 citations
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Abstract

We give a detailed account of a stationary impurity in an ideal Bose-Einstein condensate, which we call the ideal Bose polaron, at both zero and nonzero temperatures and arbitrary strength of the impurity-boson coupling. The time evolution is solved exactly and it is found that, surprisingly, many of the features that have been predicted for the real BEC are already present in this simpler setting and can be understood analytically therein. We obtain explicit formulas for the time evolution of the condensate wave function at $T=0$ and of the one-particle density matrix at $T>0$. For negative scattering length, the system is found to thermalize even though the dynamics are perfectly coherent. The time evolution and thermal values of the Tan contact are derived and compared to a recent experiment. We find that contrary to the Fermi polaron, the contact is not bounded at unitarity as long as a condensate exists. An explicit formula for the dynamical overlap at $T=0$ allows us to compute the rf spectrum which can be understood in detail by relating it to the two-body problem of one boson and the impurity.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.103.033317

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We give a detailed account of a stationary impurity in an ideal Bose-Einstein condensate, which we call the ideal Bose polaron, at both zero and nonzero temperatures and arbitrary strength of the impurity-boson coupling. The time evolution is solved exactly and it is found that, surprisingly, many of the features that have been predicted for the real BEC are already present in this simpler setting and can be understood analytically therein. We obtain explicit formulas for the time evolution of the condensate wave function at T=0T=0T=0 and of the one-particle density matrix at T>0T>0T>0. For negative scattering length, the system is found to thermalize even though the dynamics are perfectly coherent. The time evolution and thermal values of the Tan contact are derived and compared to a recent experiment. We find that contrary to the Fermi polaron, the contact is not bounded at unitarity as long as a condensate exists. An explicit formula for the dynamical overlap at T=0T=0T=0 allows us to compute the rf spectrum which can be understood in detail by relating it to the two-body problem of one boson and the impurity.
We investigate the formation of a Bose polaron when a single impurity in a Bose-Einstein condensate is quenched from a noninteracting to an attractively interacting state in the vicinity of a Feshbach resonance. We use a beyond-Fr\"ohlich Hamiltonian to describe both sides of the resonance and a coherent-state variational ansatz to compute the time evolution of Boson density profiles in position space. We find that on the repulsive side of the Feshbach resonance, the Bose polaron performs long-lived oscillations, which is surprising given that the two-body problem has only one bound state coupled to a continuum. They arise due to interference between multiply occupied bound states and therefore can be only found with many-body approaches, such as the coherent-state ansatz. This is a distinguishing feature of the Bose polaron compared to the Fermi polaron, where the bound state can be occupied only once. We derive an implicit equation for the frequency of these oscillations and show that it can be approximated by the energy of the two-body bound state. Finally, we consider an impurity introduced at nonzero velocity and find that, on the repulsive side, it is periodically slowed down or even arrested before speeding up again.
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 Fröhlich 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 of bosons is attracted toward the impurity. Here we present a solution of the Bose polaron problem beyond the Bogoliubov approximation which includes the local repulsion between bosons and thereby stabilizes the Bose polaron even near and beyond the scattering resonance. We show that the Bose polaron energy remains bounded from below across the resonance and the size of the polaron dressing cloud stays finite. Our results demonstrate how the dressing cloud replaces the attractive impurity potential with an effective many-body potential that excludes binding. We find that at resonance, including the effects of boson repulsion, the polaron energy depends universally on the effective range. Moreover, while the impurity contact is strongly peaked at positive scattering length, it remains always finite. Our solution highlights how Bose polarons are self-stabilized by repulsion, providing a mechanism to understand quench dynamics and nonequilibrium time evolution at strong coupling.
We discuss the quench dynamics of an isolated system composed of a single spinful impurity in the transverse Rabi field and bath of non-interacting three- and two-dimensional bosons. Specifically, we consider the evolution of bosons and a spin-12\frac{1}{2}21​ particle, initially prepared in a Bose-Einstein condensate state and a magnetic ground state, respectively, with the spin-dependent contact boson-impurity interaction switched on. Applying an original mean-field-like approximation, which naturally reflects the statistical effects of the bosonic bath, we calculate time-dependent components of the average impurity spin and the overlap of the wave function between initial and arbitrary time moments. A key prediction is a substantial speed-up in the decoherence (thermalization) dynamics of the spin degree of freedom compared to results obtained with the Chevy-like ansatz.
We consider an impurity immersed in a Bose-Einstein condensate with tunable boson-impurity interactions. Such a Bose polaron has recently been predicted to exhibit an intriguing energy spectrum at finite temperature, where the ground-state quasiparticle evenly splits into two branches as the temperature is increased from zero [Guenther et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 050405 (2018)]. To investigate this theoretical prediction, we employ a recently developed variational approach that systematically includes multibody correlations between the impurity and the finite-temperature medium, thus allowing us to go beyond previous finite-temperature methods. Crucially, we find that the number of quasiparticle branches is simply set by the number of hole excitations of the thermal cloud, such that including up to one hole yields one splitting, two holes yields two splittings, and so on. Moreover, this effect is independent of the impurity mass. We thus expect that the exact ground-state quasiparticle will evolve into a single broad peak for temperatures T>0T>0T>0, with a broadening that scales as T3/4{T}^{3/4}T3/4 at low temperatures and sufficiently weak boson-boson interactions. In the zero-temperature limit, we show that our calculated ground-state polaron energy is in excellent agreement with recent quantum Monte Carlo results and with experiments.
A mobile impurity coupled to a weakly interacting Bose gas, a Bose polaron, displays several interesting effects. While a single attractive quasiparticle is known to exist at zero temperature, we show here that the spectrum splits into two quasiparticles at finite temperatures for sufficiently strong impurity-boson interaction. The ground state quasiparticle has minimum energy at T_{c}, the critical temperature for Bose-Einstein condensation, and it becomes overdamped when T≫T_{c}. The quasiparticle with higher energy instead exists only below T_{c}, since it is a strong mixture of the impurity with thermally excited collective Bogoliubov modes. This phenomenology is not restricted to ultracold gases, but should occur whenever a mobile impurity is coupled to a medium featuring a gapless bosonic mode with a large population for finite temperature.
Recent experimental advances enabled the realization of mobile impurities immersed in a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of ultracold atoms. Here, we consider impurities with two or more internal hyperfine states, and study their radio-frequency (rf) absorption spectra, which correspond to transitions between two different hyperfine states. We calculate rf spectra for the case when one of the hyperfine states involved interacts with the BEC, while the other state is noninteracting, by performing a nonperturbative resummation of the probabilities of exciting different numbers of phonon modes. In the presence of interactions, the impurity gets dressed by Bogoliubov excitations of the BEC, and forms a polaron. The rf signal contains a $\ensuremath{\delta}$-function peak centered at the energy of the polaron measured relative to the bare impurity transition frequency with a weight equal to the amount of bare impurity character in the polaron state. The rf spectrum also has a broad incoherent part arising from the background excitations of the BEC, with a characteristic power-law tail that appears as a consequence of the universal physics of contact interactions. We discuss both the direct rf measurement, in which the impurity is initially in an interacting state, and the inverse rf measurement, in which the impurity is initially in a noninteracting state. In the latter case, in order to calculate the rf spectrum, we solve the problem of polaron formation: a mobile impurity is suddenly introduced in a BEC, and dynamically gets dressed by Bogoliubov phonons. Our solution is based on a time-dependent variational ansatz of coherent states of Bogoliubov phonons, which becomes exact when the impurity is localized. Moreover, we show that such an ansatz compares well with a semiclassical estimate of the propagation amplitude of a mobile impurity in the BEC. Our technique can be extended to cases when both initial and final impurity states are interacting with the BEC.