The system of a charged impurity in an interacting Bose gas has gained significant attention due to the long-range ion-atom interactions and the study of transport properties. Here, the ground-state energy of a charged Bose polaron is calculated within the Bogoliubov approximation using a generalized Feynman variational path-integral approach, which obtained accurate results for other polaron problems. We find that compared to other existing approaches, our approach gives similar and improved results while being numerically less intensive. Optical absorption, which is a standard tool to study the solid-state polaron, is introduced here as a probing method for the Bose polaron. It is calculated within the Bogoliubov approximation for weak ion-atom interactions, and the effect of finite temperature is studied. We show that the coupling of the ion to an oscillating external electric field offers a straightforward experimental probe for the charged polaron in a Bose gas, different from but complementary to existing spectroscopic techniques.
The system of a charged impurity in an interacting Bose gas has gained significant attention due to the long-range ion-atom interactions and the study of transport properties. Here, the ground-state energy of a charged Bose polaron is calculated within the Bogoliubov approximation using a generalized Feynman variational path-integral approach, which obtained accurate results for other polaron problems. We find that compared to other existing approaches, our approach gives similar and improved results while being numerically less intensive. Optical absorption, which is a standard tool to study the solid-state polaron, is introduced here as a probing method for the Bose polaron. It is calculated within the Bogoliubov approximation for weak ion-atom interactions, and the effect of finite temperature is studied. We show that the coupling of the ion to an oscillating external electric field offers a straightforward experimental probe for the charged polaron in a Bose gas, different from but complementary to existing spectroscopic techniques.
The system of a charged impurity in an interacting Bose gas has gained significant attention due to the long-range ion-atom interactions and the study of transport properties. Here, the ground state energy of a charged Bose polaron is calculated within the Bogoliubov approximation for both the Fröhlich and beyond-Fröhlich Hamiltonians using a generalized Feynman variational path-integral approach, which obtained accurate results for other polaron problems. The generalized approach, which was used to improve the energy result for the neutral polaron, has resulted in a minor improvement, indicating that Feynman's approach is sufficient when the impurity-boson interaction is long-range. Beyond-Fröhlich corrections results in the emergence of a divergence in the polaronic energy indicating a transition between the repulsive and attractive polaron regime. The path-integral approach with the beyond-Fröhlich Hamiltonian is also compared to a field-theory calculation from Christensen et al, 2021. The validity of the Bogoliubov approximation is investigated. The optical absorption has also been calculated within the Bogoliubov approximation for weak ion-atom interactions, and the effect of finite temperature has been studied. We show that the coupling of the ion to an oscillating external electric field offers a straigtforward experimental probe for the charged polaron in a Bose gas, different from but complementary to existing spectroscopic techniques.
Bose-Einstein condensation is a macroscopic quantum phenomenon where cooling down a gas of bosonic particles to ultracold temperatures results in the macroscopic occupation of the lowest energy state. This new state of matter has been used as a quantum simulator of many-body phenomena and theories due to its extreme tunability and controllability. An important example of such a many-body system is the polaron which, in its most general form, describes an impurity interacting with a bosonic bath. In the case of ultracold Bose gases, the impurity interacts with and is dressed by the Bogoliubov excitations of the gas. A supersolid is a state of matter that exhibits both superfluidity and crystalline order, which are seemingly irreconcilable properties. It has recently been observed in dipolar ultracold Bose gases, where it arises from the long-range anisotropic dipole-dipole interactions, and also other systems. The breaking of both translational symmetry and gauge symmetry results in multiple excitation modes in the supersolid. In this thesis, the charged Bose polaron and an impurity in a dipolar ultracold Bose gas exhibiting supersolidity (the supersolid Bose polaron) are studied. The ground-state properties of the charged Bose polaron are discussed using a variational path-integral approach. Absorption spectroscopy is proposed as a probe of the charged Bose polaron, and the optical response is studied for weak impurity-boson interactions. Next, the one-dimensional dipolar supersolid Bose polaron is investigated where multiple approaches are used for the derivation of the ground-state properties. The study of the polaron problem with a supersolid background is of particular interest because of the rich excitation spectrum of the supersolid. Interesting phenomena, such as possible localization of the polaron to a single droplet for strong interactions, are observed. The absorption spectrum of a charged impurity in the supersolid is also derived, which, because of the different excitation modes of the supersolid, shows multiple peaks from which information such as the superfluid fraction may be obtained.
The description of an impurity atom in a Bose-Einstein condensate can be cast in the form of Fr\"ohlich's polaron Hamiltonian, where the Bogoliubov excitations play the role of the phonons. An expression for the corresponding polaronic coupling strength is derived, relating the coupling strength to the scattering lengths, the trap size and the number of Bose condensed atoms. This allows to identify several approaches to reach the strong-coupling limit for the quantum gas polarons, whereas this limit was hitherto experimentally inaccessible in solids. We apply Feynman's path-integral method to calculate for all coupling strengths the polaronic shift in the free energy and the increase in the effective mass. The effect of temperature on these quantities is included in the description. We find similarities to the acoustic polaron results and indications of a transition between free polarons and self-trapped polarons. The prospects, based on the current theory, of investigating the polaron physics with ultracold gases are discussed for lithium atoms in a sodium condensate.
The ground state of a charged Bose gas is studied throughout a large range of densities in a self-consistent-field approximation formalism which includes the short-range correlations between bosons through a local-field correction. Numerical self-consistent calculations have been carried out in order to determine the static structure factor $S(\stackrel{\ensuremath{\rightarrow}}{\mathrm{q}})$. Hence, from $S(\stackrel{\ensuremath{\rightarrow}}{\mathrm{q}})$ we have obtained the pair-correlation functions, the ground-state energy which essentially is the correlation energy, the pressure of the gas, and, from Feynman's relation, the energy spectrum of elementary excitations. The response of the system to a static impurity charge has also been investigated. In the high-density limit our calculations show the same results as those given by Bogoliubov's perturbation theory. In the intermediate-density region, corresponding to the strongly coupled system, our results are in very good agreement with recent calculations based on the hypernetted-chain integral equation as well as Monte Carlo computations.
The supersolid phase of a dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate has an intriguing excitation spectrum displaying a band structure. Here, the dressing of an impurity in a one-dimensional dipolar supersolid with the excitations of the supersolid is studied. The ground-state energy of the supersolid polaron is calculated using a variational path integral approach, which obtained accurate results for other polaron systems within the Bogoliubov and Fr\"ohlich approximations. A divergence is observed at the superfluid-supersolid phase transition. The polaron radius is also computed, showing that, as a function of impurity-atom interactions, the polaron can become localized to a single droplet, behaving like a small solid-state polaron.
An impurity particle interacting with a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) leads to the formation of a quasiparticle known as the Bose polaron. We investigate the properties of the two-dimensional Bose polaron, applying a variational ansatz that contains up to three Bogoliubov excitations of the BEC. Similar to its three-dimensional counterpart, we observe the existence of two quasiparticle branches, namely, the attractive and the repulsive polarons, at different coupling strengths. We find that their energies agree well with recent quantum Monte Carlo calculations. In particular, we observe that the inclusion of three excitations is crucial to capture the attractive polaron energy towards the regime of strong attraction, where the quasiparticle properties are dominated by few-body correlations. We also calculate the attractive polaron effective mass and residue, where we find significant differences between considering a weakly interacting Bose medium and taking the noninteracting limit, signaling enhanced impurity dressing by excitations in the latter case. By contrast, the spectral weight of the metastable repulsive polaron is largely insensitive to the interactions in the BEC and the number of Bogoliubov excitations. Our model may be experimentally realized in dilute atomic vapors and atomically thin semiconductors.