arXiv:2209.03396 · Physical Review A
Interaction-controlled impurity transport in trapped mixtures of ultracold bosons
Judith Becker, Maxim Pyzh, Peter Schmelcher
Abstract
We explore the dynamical transport of an impurity between different embedding majority species, which are spatially separated in a double well. The transfer and storage of the impurity is triggered by dynamically changing the interaction strengths between the impurity and the two majority species. We find a simple but efficient protocol consisting of linear ramps of majority-impurity interactions at designated times to pin or unpin the impurity. Our study of this highly imbalanced few-body triple mixture is conducted with the multilayer multiconfiguration time-dependent Hartree method for atomic mixtures, which accounts for all interaction-induced correlations. We analyze the dynamics in terms of single-particle densities and entanglement growth and provide an effective potential description involving mean fields of the interacting components. The majority components remain self-trapped in their individual wells at all times, which is a crucial element for the effectiveness of our protocol. During storage times each component performs low-amplitude dipole oscillations in a single well. Unexpectedly, the interspecies correlations possess a stabilizing impact on the transport and storage properties of the impurity particle.