arXiv:2602.06169 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B
Mobile impurity interacting with a Hubbard chain and the role of Friedel oscillations
Felipe Isaule, Abel Rojo-Francàs, Duc T. Hoang, Thomás Fogarty, Thomas Busch, Bruno Juliá-Díaz
Abstract
This work examines a mobile impurity interacting with a bath of a few spin- ↑ and spin- ↓ fermions in a small one-dimensional open lattice system. We study ground-state properties using the exact diagonalization method, where the system is modeled by a three-component Fermi Hubbard Hamiltonian. We find that in addition to the standard phase separation between a strongly repulsive impurity and the bath, a strongly attractive impurity also phase separates with the fermionic holes due to the particle-hole symmetry. Furthermore, we find that the impurity can show an oscillatory pattern in its density for intermediate attractive and repulsive bath-impurity interactions, which are induced by Friedel oscillations in the finite-size fermionic bath. This rich behavior of the impurity could be probed with fermionic ultracold mixtures in optical lattices.