We study a weakly interacting one-dimensional Bose gas with two impurities coupled locally to the boson density. We derive analytical results for the induced interaction between the impurities at arbitrary positive coupling and separation
r. At $r\ensuremath{\lesssim}\ensuremath{\xi}$, where $\ensuremath{\xi}$ denotes the healing length of the Bose gas, the interaction is well described by the mean-field contribution. Its form changes as the coupling is increased, approaching a linear function of
r at short distances in the regime of strong coupling. The mean-field contribution decays exponentially at arbitrary coupling for $r\ensuremath{\gg}\ensuremath{\xi}$. At such long distances, however, the effect of quantum fluctuations becomes important, giving rise to a long-ranged quantum contribution to the induced interaction. At longest distances it behaves as
1/r3, while at strong coupling we find an intermediate distance regime with a slower decay,
1/r. The quantum contribution in the crossover regime is also calculated. The induced interaction between impurities (i.e., polarons) is attractive and leads to the formation of their bound state, known as bipolaron. We discuss its binding energy.
We study the fluctuation-induced interaction between two impurities in a weakly interacting one-dimensional Bose gas using the field-theoretical approach. At separations between impurities shorter and of the order of the healing length of the system, the induced interaction has a classical origin and behaves exponentially. At separations longer than the healing length, the interaction is of a quantum origin and scales as the third power of the inverse distance. Finite temperature destroys the quasi-long-range order of the Bose gas and, accordingly, the induced interaction becomes exponentially suppressed beyond the thermal length. We obtain analytical expressions for the induced interaction at zero and finite temperature that are valid at arbitrary distances. We discuss experimental realizations as well as possible formation of bound states of two impurities, known as bipolarons.
A few years ago, flow equations were introduced as a technique for calculating the ground-state energies of cold Bose gases with and without impurities[1,2]. In this paper, we extend this approach to compute observables other than the energy. As an example, we calculate the densities, and phase fluctuations of one-dimensional Bose gases with one and two impurities. For a single mobile impurity, we use flow equations to validate the mean-field results obtained upon the Lee-Low-Pines transformation. We show that the mean-field approximation is accurate for all values of the boson-impurity interaction strength as long as the phase coherence length is much larger than the healing length of the condensate. For two static impurities, we calculate impurity-impurity interactions induced by the Bose gas. We find that leading order perturbation theory fails when boson-impurity interactions are stronger than boson-boson interactions. The mean-field approximation reproduces the flow equation results for all values of the boson-impurity interaction strength as long as boson-boson interactions are weak.