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Physical Review A

Effective mass and interaction energy of heavy Bose polarons at unitarity

Nikolay Yegovtsev, Victor Gurarie

Published Nov 14, 2023• 4 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The authors study the effective mass of a heavy impurity moving through a Bose-Einstein condensate, and the condensate-induced attraction between two such impurities in the regime of strong boson-impurity interactions. This problem turns out to be analytically solvable in the regime of small gas densities.
DOI
10.1103/physreva.108.l051301

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We study the motion of a heavy impurity immersed in a weakly interacting BEC using the Gross-Pitaevskii equation (GPe). We construct a perturbative solution to the GPe in powers of impurity velocity in the case when the boson-impurity potential is tuned to unitarity and calculate the effective mass of the polaron. In addition, we calculate the interaction energy of two unitary polarons which are sufficiently far apart. Our formalism also reproduces the results for both the mass and interaction energy obtained at weak boson-impurity coupling.
When an impurity is immersed in a Bose-Einstein condensate, impurity-boson interactions are expected to dress the impurity into a quasiparticle, the Bose polaron. We superimpose an ultracold atomic gas of ^{87}Rb with a much lower density gas of fermionic ^{40}K impurities. Through the use of a Feshbach resonance and radio-frequency spectroscopy, we characterize the energy, spectral width, and lifetime of the resultant polaron on both the attractive and the repulsive branches in the strongly interacting regime. The width of the polaron in the attractive branch is narrow compared to its binding energy, even as the two-body scattering length diverges.
We consider two heavy impurities immersed in a Bose-Einstein condensate, and calculate the self-energy using the Wilsonian renormalization. The polaron energy, quasiparticle residue and damping rate are extracted from the self-energy. We demonstrate that various effective potentials emerge from the polaron energy under the specific conditions. In the limit of large separation between the impurities, the polaron spectrum converges to the results for a single impurity, exhibiting an attractive-repulsive crossover across the Feshbach resonance. The boundary of this crossover is identified through the analysis of the damping rate. We highlight that repulsive-dominant polarons can exist as long as the impurities are sufficiently close, even when the impurity-boson interactions are attractive. Additionally, we observe that the two impurities become asymptotically free in the repulsive polaron regime. These results are verifiable and offer a fresh perspective on the interaction dynamics between two polarons.
We investigate the properties of an impurity immersed in a dilute Bose gas at zero temperature using quantum Monte Carlo methods. The interactions between bosons are modeled by a hard-sphere potential with scattering length aaa, whereas the interactions between the impurity and the bosons are modeled by a short-range, square-well potential where both the sign and the strength of the scattering length bbb can be varied by adjusting the well depth. We characterize the attractive and the repulsive polaron branch by calculating the binding energy and the effective mass of the impurity. Furthermore, we investigate the structural properties of the bath, such as the impurity-boson contact parameter and the change of the density profile around the impurity. At the unitary limit of the impurity-boson interaction, we find that the effective mass of the impurity remains smaller than twice its bare mass, while the binding energy scales with ${\ensuremath{\hbar}}^{2}{n}^{2/3}/m$, where nnn is the density of the bath and mmm is the common mass of the impurity and the bosons in the bath. The implications for the phase diagram of binary Bose-Bose mixtures at low concentrations are also discussed.
A new generation of cold atom experiments trapping atomic mixtures in species-selective optical potentials opens up the intriguing possibility to create systems in which different atoms live in different spatial dimensions. Inspired by this, we investigate a mixed-dimensional Bose polaron consisting of an impurity particle moving in a two-dimensional (2D) layer immersed in a 3D Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), using a theory that includes the mixed-dimensional vacuum scattering between the impurity and the bosons exactly. We show that similarly to the pure 3D case, this system exhibits a well-defined polaron state for attractive boson-impurity interaction that evolves smoothly into a mixed-dimensional dimer for strong attraction, as well as a well-defined polaron state for weak repulsive interaction, which becomes overdamped for strong interaction. We furthermore find that the properties of the polaron depend only weakly on the gas parameter of the BEC as long as the Bogoliubov theory remains a valid description for the BEC. This indicates that higher-order correlations between the impurity and the bosons are suppressed by the mixed-dimensional geometry in comparison to a pure 3D system, which led us to speculate that the mixed-dimensional polaron has universal properties in the unitarity limit of the impurity-boson interaction.
By means of quantum Monte Carlo methods we calculate the binding energy of an impurity immersed in a Bose-Einstein condensate at T=0T=0T=0. The focus is on the attractive branch of the Bose polaron and on the role played by the mass imbalance between the impurity and the surrounding particles. For an impurity resonantly coupled to the bath, we investigate the dependence of the binding energy on the mass ratio and on the interaction strength within the medium. In particular, we determine the equation of state in the case of a static (infinite mass) impurity, where three-body correlations are irrelevant and the result is expected to be a universal function of the gas parameter. For the mass ratio corresponding to 40K^{40}\mathrm{K}40K impurities in a gas of 87Rb^{87}\mathrm{Rb}87Rb atoms, we provide an explicit comparison with the experimental findings of a recent study carried out at JILA.