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arXiv:2411.19947 · Physical Review A

Operator-valued-flow-equation approach to the bosonic lattice polaron: Dispersion renormalization beyond the Fröhlich paradigm

Jan-Philipp Christ, Pit Bermes, Fabian Grusdt

Published Jul 30, 2025• 2 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We consider the ground-state properties of a lattice Bose polaron, a quasiparticle arising from the interaction between an impurity confined to an optical lattice and a surrounding homogeneous Bose-Einstein condensate hosting phononic modes. We present an extension of Wegner's and Wilson's flow equation approach, the operator-valued-flow-equation approach, which allows us to calculate the renormalized dispersion of the polaron and assess the role of two-phonon scattering processes on the dispersion. The results obtained in this way are compared to a variational mean-field approach, which will allow us to demonstrate that the flow equations behave correctly at weak coupling. We find that in certain impurity phonon interaction regimes the shape of the dispersion is significantly altered by the inclusion of two-phonon scattering events as opposed to only single-phonon scattering events. Moreover, our results predict that a polaronic bound state may emerge, which is not present in Fröhlich-type models that only consider single-phonon scattering events.

DOI
10.1103/pcsy-czjp

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We consider the ground-state properties of a lattice Bose polaron, a quasiparticle arising from the interaction between an impurity confined to an optical lattice and a surrounding homogeneous Bose-Einstein condensate hosting phononic modes. We present an extension of Wegner's and Wilson's flow equation approach, the operator-valued-flow-equation approach, which allows us to calculate the renormalized dispersion of the polaron and assess the role of two-phonon scattering processes on the dispersion. The results obtained in this way are compared to a variational mean-field approach, which will allow us to demonstrate that the flow equations behave correctly at weak coupling. We find that in certain impurity phonon interaction regimes the shape of the dispersion is significantly altered by the inclusion of two-phonon scattering events as opposed to only single-phonon scattering events. Moreover, our results predict that a polaronic bound state may emerge, which is not present in Fröhlich-type models that only consider single-phonon scattering events.
The Fr\"ohlich model describes the interaction of a mobile impurity with a surrounding bath of phonons which leads to the formation of a quasiparticle, the polaron. In this paper an efficient renormalization group approach is presented which provides a description of Fr\"ohlich polarons in all regimes ranging from weak to strong coupling. The extended renormalization group approach introduced here is capable of predicting ground state properties for arbitrarily small impurity masses. This allows us to obtain the full phase diagram of the Fr\"ohlich Hamiltonian, which we present concretely for the Bogoliubov-Fr\"ohlich model originally introduced to describe ultracold impurities in a Bose-Einstein condensate. For this model, whose regime of validity in ultracold quantum gases is the subject of debate, we benchmark our method by comparison of the ground state energy to recent diagrammatic quantum Monte Carlo calculations.
An impurity immersed in a Bose-Einstein condensate is no longer accurately described by the Fr\"ohlich Hamiltonian as the coupling between the impurity and the boson bath gets stronger. We study the dominant effects of the two-phonon terms beyond the Fr\"ohlich model on the ground-state properties of the polaron using Feynman's variational path-integral approach. The previously reported discrepancy in the effective mass between the renormalization group approach and this theory is shown to be absent in the beyond-Fr\"ohlich model on the positive side of the Feshbach resonance. Self-trapping, characterized by a sharp and dramatic increase of the effective mass, is no longer observed for the repulsive polaron once the two-phonon interactions are included. For the attractive polaron we find a divergence of the ground-state energy and effective mass at weaker couplings than previously observed within the Fr\"ohlich model.
Mobile impurity atoms immersed in Bose–Einstein condensates provide a new platform for exploring Bose polarons. Recent experimental advances in the field of ultracold atoms make it possible to realize such systems with highly tunable microscopic parameters and to explore equilibrium and dynamical properties of polarons using a rich toolbox of atomic physics. In this paper we present a detailed theoretical analysis of Bose polarons in one-dimensional systems of ultracold atoms. By combining a non-perturbative renormalization group approach with numerically exact diffusion Monte Carlo calculations we obtain not only detailed numerical results over a broad range of parameters but also qualitative understanding of different regimes of the system. We find that an accurate description of Bose polarons requires the inclusion of two-phonon scattering terms which go beyond the commonly used Fröhlich model. Furthermore we show that when the Bose gas is in the strongly interacting regime, one needs to include interactions between the phonon modes. We use several theoretical approaches to calculate the polaron energy and its effective mass. The former can be measured using radio-frequency spectroscopy and the latter can be studied experimentally using impurity oscillations in a harmonic trapping potential. We compare our theoretical results for the effective mass to the experiments by Catani et al (2012 Phys. Rev. A 85 023623). In the weak-to-intermediate coupling regimes we obtain excellent quantitative agreement between theory and experiment, without any free fitting parameter. We supplement our analysis by full dynamical simulations of polaron oscillations in a shallow trapping potential. We also use our renormalization group approach to analyze the full phase diagram and identify regions that support repulsive and attractive polarons, as well as multi-particle bound states.
Mobile impurity atoms immersed in Bose–Einstein condensates provide a new platform for exploring Bose polarons. Recent experimental advances in the field of ultracold atoms make it possible to realize such systems with highly tunable microscopic parameters and to explore equilibrium and dynamical properties of polarons using a rich toolbox of atomic physics. In this paper we present a detailed theoretical analysis of Bose polarons in one-dimensional systems of ultracold atoms. By combining a non-perturbative renormalization group approach with numerically exact diffusion Monte Carlo calculations we obtain not only detailed numerical results over a broad range of parameters but also qualitative understanding of different regimes of the system. We find that an accurate description of Bose polarons requires the inclusion of two-phonon scattering terms which go beyond the commonly used Fröhlich model. Furthermore we show that when the Bose gas is in the strongly interacting regime, one needs to include interactions between the phonon modes. We use several theoretical approaches to calculate the polaron energy and its effective mass. The former can be measured using radio-frequency spectroscopy and the latter can be studied experimentally using impurity oscillations in a harmonic trapping potential. We compare our theoretical results for the effective mass to the experiments by Catani et al (2012 Phys. Rev. A 85 023623). In the weak-to-intermediate coupling regimes we obtain excellent quantitative agreement between theory and experiment, without any free fitting parameter. We supplement our analysis by full dynamical simulations of polaron oscillations in a shallow trapping potential. We also use our renormalization group approach to analyze the full phase diagram and identify regions that support repulsive and attractive polarons, as well as multi-particle bound states.
The polaron model is a basic model of quantum field theory describing a single particle interacting with a bosonic field. It arises in many physical contexts. We are mostly concerned with models applicable in the context of an impurity atom in a Bose-Einstein condensate as well as the problem of electrons moving in polar crystals. The model has a simple structure in which the interaction of the particle with the field is given by a term linear in the field’s creation and annihilation operators. In this work, we investigate the properties of this model by providing rigorous estimates on various energies relevant to the problem. The estimates are obtained, for the most part, by suitable operator techniques which constitute the principal mathematical substance of the thesis. The first application of these techniques is to derive the polaron model rigorously from first principles, i.e., from a full microscopic quantum-mechanical many-body problem involving an impurity in an otherwise homogeneous system. We accomplish this for the N + 1 Bose gas in the mean-field regime by showing that a suitable polaron-type Hamiltonian arises at weak interactions as a low-energy effective theory for this problem. In the second part, we investigate rigorously the ground state of the model at fixed momentum and for large values of the coupling constant. Qualitatively, the system is expected to display a transition from the quasi-particle behavior at small momenta, where the dispersion relation is parabolic and the particle moves through the medium dragging along a cloud of phonons, to the radiative behavior at larger momenta where the polaron decelerates and emits free phonons. At the same time, in the strong coupling regime, the bosonic field is expected to behave purely classically. Accordingly, the effective mass of the polaron at strong coupling is conjectured to be asymptotically equal to the one obtained from the semiclassical counterpart of the problem, first studied by Landau and Pekar in the 1940s. For polaron models with regularized form factors and phonon dispersion relations of superfluid type, i.e., bounded below by a linear function of the wavenumbers for all phonon momenta as in the interacting Bose gas, we prove that for a large window of momenta below the radiation threshold, the energy-momentum relation at strong coupling is indeed essentially a parabola with semi-latus rectum equal to the Landau–Pekar effective mass, as expected. For the Fröhlich polaron describing electrons in polar crystals where the dispersion relation is of the optical type and the form factor is formally UV–singular due to the nature of the point charge-dipole interaction, we are able to give the corresponding upper bound. In contrast to the regular case, this requires the inclusion of the quantum fluctuations of the phonon field, which makes the problem considerably more difficult. The results are supplemented by studies on the absolute ground-state energy at strong coupling, a proof of the divergence of the effective mass with the coupling constant for a wide class of polaron models, as well as the discussion of the apparent UV singularity of the Fröhlich model and the application of the techniques used for its removal for the energy estimates.
Abstract Lattice polarons, quasiparticles arising from the interaction between an impurity and its surrounding bosonic environment confined to a lattice system, have emerged as a platform for generating complex few-body states, probing many-body phenomena, and addressing long-standing problems in physics. In this study, we employ a variational ansatz to investigate the quasiparticle and spectral properties of an impurity coupled to a condensate gas of hard-core bosons in a two-dimensional optical lattice. Our findings demonstrate that the polaron features can be tuned by adjusting the filling factor of the bath, revealing intriguing polaron characteristics in the strongly interacting regime. These results offer valuable insights for lattice polaron experiments with ultracold gases and can serve as a guide for new experiments in emergent quantum devices, such as moiré materials, where optical excitations can be described in terms of hard-core bosons.