A mobile impurity particle immersed in a quantum degenerate gas leads to the formation of a quasiparticle, which can serve as a sensor for its environment. Here, we develop a unified wave function description of an impurity in a two-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model across the Mott-insulator to superfluid transition. Using a multi-mode variational ansatz based on the quantum Gutzwiller approach, we show that the impurity can form several kinds of polaronic and molecular states. In addition to their spectral properties, the wave function provides direct access to the microscopic structure of these states, and we demonstrate that strong correlations in the critical regime of the quantum phase transition give rise to several non-analytic features in the polaron properties. Increasing the impurity-boson interaction leads to transitions between polaron and molecular ground states, and the number of bosons in the impurity dressing cloud grows rapidly at the quantum critical point as the bath modes soften. We furthermore reveal qualitatively distinct non-equilibrium many-body dynamics after the injection of the impurity in the different phases of the Bose-Hubbard model. Our spectral, real space, and dynamical predictions describe complementary properties of polarons in a strongly correlated bosonic bath, which can be observed using current techniques with atoms in optical lattices.
A mobile impurity particle immersed in a quantum degenerate gas leads to the formation of a quasiparticle, which can serve as a sensor for its environment. Here, we develop a unified wave function description of an impurity in a two-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model across the Mott-insulator to superfluid transition. Using a multi-mode variational ansatz based on the quantum Gutzwiller approach, we show that the impurity can form several kinds of polaronic and molecular states. In addition to their spectral properties, the wave function provides direct access to the microscopic structure of these states, and we demonstrate that strong correlations in the critical regime of the quantum phase transition give rise to several non-analytic features in the polaron properties. Increasing the impurity-boson interaction leads to transitions between polaron and molecular ground states, and the number of bosons in the impurity dressing cloud grows rapidly at the quantum critical point as the bath modes soften. We furthermore reveal qualitatively distinct non-equilibrium many-body dynamics after the injection of the impurity in the different phases of the Bose-Hubbard model. Our spectral, real space, and dynamical predictions describe complementary properties of polarons in a strongly correlated bosonic bath, which can be observed using current techniques with atoms in optical lattices.
We study the physics of a mobile impurity confined in a two-dimensional lattice, moving within a Bose-Hubbard bath at zero temperature. Exploiting the quantum Gutzwiller formalism, we develop a beyond-Fröhlich model of the bath-impurity interaction to describe the properties of the polaronic quasiparticle formed by the dressing of the impurity by quantum fluctuations of the bath. We find a stable and well-defined polaron throughout the entire phase diagram of the bath, except for the very low tunneling limit of the hard-core superfluid. The polaron properties are highly sensitive to the different universality classes of the quantum phase transition between the superfluid and Mott insulating phases, providing an unambiguous probe of correlations and collective modes in a quantum critical many-body environment.
The problem of mobile impurities in quantum baths is of fundamental importance in many-body physics. There has recently been significant progress regarding our understanding of this due to cold atom experiments, but so far it has mainly been concerned with cases where the bath has no or only weak interactions, or the impurity interacts weakly with the bath. Here, we address this gap by developing a new theoretical framework for exploring a mobile impurity interacting strongly with a highly correlated bath of bosons in the quantum critical regime of a Mott insulator (MI) to superfluid (SF) quantum phase transition. Our framework is based on a powerful quantum Gutzwiller (QGW) description of the bosonic bath combined with diagrammatic field theory for the impurity-bath interactions. By resumming a selected class of diagrams to infinite order, a rich picture emerges where the impurity is dressed by the fundamental modes of the bath, which change character from gapped particle-hole excitations in the MI to Higgs and gapless Goldstone modes in the SF. This gives rise to the existence of several quasiparticle (polaron) branches with properties reflecting the strongly correlated environment. In particular, one polaron branch exhibits a sharp cusp in its energy, while a new ground-state polaron emerges at the O(2) O ( 2 ) quantum phase transition point for integer filling, which reflects the nonanalytic behavior at the transition and the appearance of the Goldstone mode in the SF phase. Smooth versions of these features are inherited in the polaron spectrum away from integer filling due to the influence of Mott physics on the bosonic bath. We furthermore compare our diagrammatic results with quantum Monte Carlo calculations, obtaining excellent agreement. This accuracy is quite remarkable for such a highly non-trivial case of strong interactions between the impurity and bosons in a maximally correlated quantum critical regime, and it establishes the utility of our framework. Finally, our results show how impurities can be used as quantum sensors and highlight fundamental differences between experiments performed at a fixed particle number or a fixed chemical potential.
We investigate the zero-temperature properties of a mobile impurity immersed in a bath of bosonic particles confined to a square lattice. We analyze the regimes of attractive and repulsive coupling between the impurity and the bath particles for different strengths of boson-boson interactions in the bath, using exact large-scale quantum Monte-Carlo simulations in the grand canonical ensemble. For weak coupling, the polaron mass ratio is found to decrease around the Mott insulator (MI) to superfluid (SF) transition of the bath, as predicted by recent theory, confirming the possible use of the impurity as a probe for the transition. For strong coupling in the MI regime, instead, the impurity is found to modify the bath density by binding to an extra bath particle or a hole, depending on the sign of the polaron-bath interactions. While the binding prevent the aforementioned use of the polaron mass ratio as an MI-SF transition probe, we show that it can be used instead as a probe of the binding itself. Our exact numerical results provide a benchmark for comparing lattice Bose polaron theories and are relevant for experiments with cold atoms trapped in optical lattices, where the presence of a confining harmonic potential can be modeled by a slowly varying local chemical potential.
The most recent advances in the ultracold atoms experimental techniques allowed the production of the ultracold gases mixtures in the laboratory.Motivated by these developments, in this project we study systems involving two ultracold atoms mixtures.In the first part, we consider a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) with a vortex lattice weakly interacting with another utracold dilute bosonic gas.We apply the Bose-Hubbard (BH) model to describe the atoms of the minority species trapped in the vortex lattice.As occurs in a static optical lattice, we predict the quantum phase transition between the Mott insulator to superfluid phases, which now can be controlled by changing the intra and inter-species scattering length.Considering the intrinsic lattice dynamics, the Tkachenko modes of the vortex lattice, we derive an extended BH Hamiltonian and analyzed new properties in the phase diagram that arise from a long-range attractive potential and density-dependent hopping.In the second part, we study the properties of a mobile impurity living in two dimensions and interacting with a 2 and 3 BEC cloud.The resulting impurity-bath interaction leads to the formation of a polaron (particle "dressed" by the phonon excitations of the BEC), which is characterized by its spectral function.We determine the energy dispersion, spectral weight, effective mass and lifetime of the polaron.These analysis allowed us to identify a dissipative regime for higher impurity velocities, with an increasing scattering rate of phonons.In addition, we observe a self-localization regime for lower impurity velocities which may be a signature for molecular formation.In spite of qualitatively similar results obtained for the 2 and 3 bath, we had differences related to the self-localization and dissipation limits, that allowed us to conclude that a 2 BEC bath would be a better candidate to observe stable quasi-particle properties.
We map out the global phase diagram of a single mobile impurity in the two-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model, spanning the bath evolution from a compressible superfluid (SF) to an incompressible Mott insulator (MI) and the full range of impurity-bath coupling. Using sign-problem-free worm-algorithm quantum Monte Carlo, we identify two distinct self-trapping mechanisms that organize the entire diagram. In the compressible SF, increasing impurity-bath coupling ∣Uib∣ drives an interaction-driven self-trapping crossover signaled by a collapse of the \emph{impurity} winding number: a light, extended polaron evolves continuously into a heavy polaron and ultimately into a self-trapped state -- a repulsive \emph{saturated bubble} or an attractive \emph{bound cluster} -- even while the bath remains globally superfluid, demonstrating self-trapping without any bath phase transition. By contrast, when the bath is tuned across the SF-MI transition at fixed Uib, localization is compressibility controlled. The vanishing bath compressibility quenches long-wavelength density redistribution and suppresses polaronic dressing, converting the SF polaron into a weakly dressed, nearly free defect upon entering the MI when ∣Uib∣≤8.0. Then increasing ∣Uib∣ triggers a distinct Mott-specific route: the impurity binds a quantized vacancy or particle excitation, manifested by discrete changes ΔNb=±1 in the total bath occupation. Together, our results provide a unified microscopic picture of impurity self-trapping in correlated lattice bosons, governed by winding collapse in the SF and by compressibility loss and defect quantization across the SF-MI boundary.
Impurities immersed in hard-core Bose gases offer exciting opportunities to explore polaron and bipolaron physics. We investigate the ground state properties of a single and a pair of impurities throughout the superfluid and insulating (charge density wave) phases of the bosonic environment. In the superfluid phase, the impurity exhibits polaron-like behavior, forming a dressed quasiparticle. In contrast, in the insulating phase, the impurity regains its particle-like character, moving through a potential landscape shaped by the charge density wave order. Moreover, we show that two impurities can form a bound state even in the absence of an explicit impurity-impurity coupling. We establish the stability of this bound state within both the superfluid and insulating phases. Our results offer valuable insights for ongoing lattice polaron experiments with ultracold gases.