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Communications Physics

Emergence of a Bose polaron in a small ring threaded by the Aharonov-Bohm flux

Fabian Brauneis, Areg Ghazaryan, H.‐W. Hammer, Artem G. Volosniev

Published Aug 22, 2023• 6 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Abstract The model of a ring threaded by the Aharonov-Bohm flux underlies our understanding of a coupling between gauge potentials and matter. The typical formulation of the model is based upon a single particle picture, and should be extended when interactions with other particles become relevant. Here, we illustrate such an extension for a particle in an Aharonov-Bohm ring subject to interactions with a weakly interacting Bose gas. We show that the ground state of the system can be described using the Bose-polaron concept—a particle dressed by interactions with a bosonic environment. We connect the energy spectrum to the effective mass of the polaron, and demonstrate how to change currents in the system by tuning boson-particle interactions. Our results suggest the Aharonov-Bohm ring as a platform for studying coherence and few- to many-body crossover of quasi-particles that arise from an impurity immersed in a medium.

DOI
10.1038/s42005-023-01281-2

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Abstract The model of a ring threaded by the Aharonov-Bohm flux underlies our understanding of a coupling between gauge potentials and matter. The typical formulation of the model is based upon a single particle picture, and should be extended when interactions with other particles become relevant. Here, we illustrate such an extension for a particle in an Aharonov-Bohm ring subject to interactions with a weakly interacting Bose gas. We show that the ground state of the system can be described using the Bose-polaron concept—a particle dressed by interactions with a bosonic environment. We connect the energy spectrum to the effective mass of the polaron, and demonstrate how to change currents in the system by tuning boson-particle interactions. Our results suggest the Aharonov-Bohm ring as a platform for studying coherence and few- to many-body crossover of quasi-particles that arise from an impurity immersed in a medium.
The model of a ring threaded by the Aharonov-Bohm flux underlies our understanding of a coupling between gauge potentials and matter. The typical formulation of the model is based upon a single particle picture, and should be extended when interactions with other particles become relevant. Here, we illustrate such an extension for a particle in an Aharonov-Bohm ring subject to interactions with a weakly interacting Bose gas. We show that the ground state of the system can be described using the Bose polaron concept -- a particle dressed by interactions with a bosonic environment. We connect the energy spectrum to the effective mass of the polaron, and demonstrate how to change currents in the system by tuning boson-particle interactions. Our results suggest the Aharonov-Bohm ring as a platform for studying coherence and few- to many-body crossover of quasi-particles that arise from an impurity immersed in a medium.
Advancing our understanding of non-equilibrium phenomena in quantum many-body systems remains one of the greatest challenges in physics. Here we report on the experimental observation of a paradigmatic many-body problem, namely the non-equilibrium dynamics of a quantum impurity immersed in a bosonic environment1,2. We use an interferometric technique to prepare coherent superposition states of atoms in a Bose–Einstein condensate with a small impurity-state component, and monitor the evolution of such quantum superpositions into polaronic quasiparticles. These results offer a systematic picture of polaron formation3–7 from weak to strong impurity interactions. They reveal three distinct regimes of evolution with dynamical transitions that provide a link between few-body processes and many-body dynamics. Our measurements reveal universal dynamical behaviour in interacting many-body systems and demonstrate new pathways to study non-equilibrium quantum phenomena. Quantum impurities immersed in a bosonic environment can evolve into polaronic quasiparticles, so-called polarons. Interferometric measurement reveals this transition, which involves three different regimes dominated by few-body and many-body dynamics.
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.
Cold atom experiments show that a mobile impurity particle immersed in a weakly interacting Bose-Einstein condensate forms a well-defined quasiparticle (Bose polaron) for weak to moderate impurity-boson interaction strengths, whereas a significant line broadening is consistently observed for strong interactions. Motivated by this, we introduce a phenomenological theory based on the assumption that the most relevant states are characterized by the impurity correlated with at most one boson, since they have the largest overlap with the uncorrelated states to which the most common experimental probes couple. These experimentally relevant states can, however, decay to lower energy states characterized by correlations involving multiple bosons, and we model this using a minimal variational wave function combined with a complex impurity-boson interaction strength. We first motivate this approach by comparing to a more elaborate theory that includes correlations with up to two bosons. Our phenomenological model is shown to recover the main results of two recent experiments probing both the spectral and the nonequilibrium properties of the Bose polaron. Our work offers an intuitive framework for analyzing experimental data and highlights the importance of understanding the complicated problem of the Bose polaron decay in a many-body setting.
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.