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arXiv:2311.14313 · Physical Review A

Exact results for heavy unitary Bose polarons

Nikolay Yegovtsev, G. E. Astrakharchik, Pietro Massignan, Victor Gurarie

Published Aug 8, 2024• 6 citations
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Abstract

We consider the problem of unitary Bose polarons, i.e., impurities interacting via a potential with infinite scattering length with a bath of weakly interacting bosons. We provide an analytic expression for the energy of a heavy impurity whose interaction potential has a range larger than the healing length of the bath. Furthermore, we perform numerically exact diffusion Monte Carlo calculations and we demonstrate that the simple Gross-Pitaevskii theory provides a remarkably accurate description of heavy unitary Bose polarons throughout the whole experimentally relevant range of gas densities.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.110.023310

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•Apr 27, 2015•3 citations
We consider the problem of unitary Bose polarons, i.e., impurities interacting via a potential with infinite scattering length with a bath of weakly interacting bosons. We provide an analytic expression for the energy of a heavy impurity whose interaction potential has a range larger than the healing length of the bath. Furthermore, we perform numerically exact diffusion Monte Carlo calculations and we demonstrate that the simple Gross-Pitaevskii theory provides a remarkably accurate description of heavy unitary Bose polarons throughout the whole experimentally relevant range of gas densities.
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.
We study the motion of a heavy impurity immersed in a weakly interacting BEC using the Gross-Pitaevskii equation (GPe). We construct a perturbative solution to the GPe in powers of impurity velocity in the case when the boson-impurity potential is tuned to unitarity and calculate the effective mass of the polaron. In addition, we calculate the interaction energy of two unitary polarons which are sufficiently far apart. Our formalism also reproduces the results for both the mass and interaction energy obtained at weak boson-impurity coupling.
An impurity in a Bose gas is commonly referred to as a Bose polaron. For a dilute Bose gas, its properties are expected to be universal, i.e., dependent only on a few parameters characterizing the boson-impurity interactions. It has been known for some time that when boson-impurity interactions are weak, the properties of the polaron depend only on the scattering length of these interactions. In this paper, which accompanies Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 123403 (2021) (where some of these results have already been reported), we examine stronger boson-impurity interactions, keeping their range finite. We demonstrate that for attractive interactions between impurity and the bosons up to and including the unitary point, all static properties of a Bose polaron in a dilute Bose gas can be calculated in terms of the scattering length and an additional parameter that characterizes the range of the impurity-boson interactions. Our approach is valid if this parameter does not deviate too much from the scattering length of intraboson interactions, with the precise criterion given in the text. We produce explicit expressions for the energy and other properties of a polaron for the case when the impurity-boson scattering length is tuned to unitarity, and we also provide the first correction away from it.
We study the properties of an impurity immersed in a weakly interacting Bose gas, i.e., of a Bose polaron. In the perturbatively tractable limit of weak impurity-boson interactions many of its properties are known to depend only on the scattering length. Here we demonstrate that for strong (unitary) impurity-boson interactions all quasiparticle properties of a heavy Bose polaron, such as its energy, its residue, its Tan's contact, and the number of bosons trapped nearby the impurity, depend on the impurity-boson potential via a single parameter characterizing its range.
We present a theoretical study based upon quantum Monte Carlo methods of the Bose polaron in one-dimensional systems with contact interactions. In this instance of the problem of a single impurity immersed in a quantum bath, the medium is a Lieb-Liniger gas of bosons ranging from the weakly interacting to the Tonks-Girardeau regime, whereas the impurity is coupled to the bath via a different contact potential, producing both repulsive and attractive interactions. Both the case of a mobile impurity, having the same mass as the particles in the medium, and the case of a static impurity with infinite mass are considered. We make use of numerical techniques that allow us to calculate the ground-state energy of the impurity, its effective mass, and the contact parameter between the impurity and the bath. These quantities are investigated as a function of the strength of interactions between the impurity and the bath and within the bath. In particular, we find that the effective mass rapidly increases to very large values when the impurity gets strongly coupled to an otherwise weakly repulsive bath. This heavy impurity hardly moves within the medium, thereby realizing the ``self-localization'' regime of the Landau-Pekar polaron. Furthermore, we compare our results with predictions of perturbation theory valid for weak interactions and with exact solutions available when the bosons in the medium behave as impenetrable particles.
In this thesis we investigate the properties of impurities immersed in a dilute Bose gas at zero temperature using quantum Monte-Carlo methods. The interactions between bosons are modeled by a hard sphere potential with scattering length a, whereas the interactions between the impurity and the bosons are modeled by a short-range, square-well potential where both the sign and the strength of the scattering length b can be varied by adjusting the well depth. We calculate the binding energy, the effective mass and the pair correlation functions of a impurity along the attractive and the repulsive polaron branch. In particular, at the unitary limit of the impurity-bosons interaction, we find that the binding energy is much larger than the chemical potential of the bath signaling that many bosons dress the impurity thereby lowering its energy and increasing its effective mass. We characterize this state by calculating the bosons-boson pair correlation function and by investigating the dependence of the binding energy on the gas parameter of the bosonic bath. We also investigate the ground-state properties of M impurities in a Bose gas at T=0. In particular, the energy and the phase diagram by using both quantum Monte-Carlo and mean field methods.