We develop a microscopic theory describing a quantum impurity whose rotational degree of freedom is coupled to a many-particle bath. We approach the problem by introducing the concept of an 'angulon' - a quantum rotor dressed by a quantum field - and reveal its quasiparticle properties using a combination of variational and diagrammatic techniques. Our theory predicts renormalisation of the impurity rotational structure, such as observed in experiments with molecules in superfluid helium droplets, in terms of a rotational Lamb shift induced by the many-particle environment. Furthermore, we discover a rich many-body-induced fine structure, emerging in rotational spectra due to a redistribution of angular momentum within the quantum many-body system.
Induced interactions and bound states of charge carriers immersed in a quantum medium are crucial for the investigation of quantum transport. Ultracold atom-ion systems can provide a convenient platform for studying this problem. Here, we investigate the static properties of one and two ionic impurities in a bosonic bath using quantum Monte Carlo methods. We identify three bipolaronic regimes depending on the strength of the atom-ion potential and the number of its two-body bound states: a perturbative regime resembling the situation of a pair of neutral impurities, a non-perturbative regime t…
We unravel the periodically driven dynamics of two repulsively interacting bosonic impurities within a bosonic bath upon considering either the impact of a finite pulse or a continuous shaking of the impurities harmonic trap. Following a pulse driving of initially miscible components we reveal a variety of dynamical response regimes depending on the driving frequency. At resonant drivings the impurities decouple from their host while if exposed to a high frequency driving they remain trapped in the bosonic gas. For continuous shaking we showcase that in the resonantly driven regime the impurit…
We consider two identical impurities immersed in a Fermi sea for a broad range of masses and for both interacting and non-interacting impurities. The interaction between the particles is described through attractive zero-range potentials and the problem is solved in momentum space. The two impurities can attach to a fermion from the sea and form three-body bound states. The energy of these states increase as function of the Fermi momentum $k_F$, leading to three-body bound states below the Fermi energy. The fate of the states depends highly on two- and three-body thresholds and we find evidenc…
We exactly calculate the full temperature dependence of Casimir-like forces appearing between two and three static impurities loaded in the ideal Bose gas below the Bose-Einstein condensation transition point. Assuming the short-ranged character of the boson-impurity interaction, the calculation procedure presented here can be easily extended on a Bose system with an arbitrary number of impurities immersed.
We study the ground state properties and nonequilibrium dynamics of two spinor bosonic impurities immersed in a one-dimensional bosonic gas upon applying an interspecies interaction quench. For the ground state of two non-interacting impurities we reveal signatures of attractive induced interactions in both cases of attractive or repulsive interspecies interactions, while a weak impurity-impurity repulsion forces the impurities to stay apart. Turning to the quench dynamics we inspect the time-evolution of the contrast unveiling the existence, dynamical deformation and the orthogonality catastr…
We unravel the many-body dynamics of a harmonically trapped impurity colliding with a bosonic medium confined in a double-well upon quenching the initially displaced harmonic trap to the center of the double-well. We reveal that the emerging correlation dynamics crucially depends on the impurity-medium interaction strength allowing for a classification into different dynamical response regimes. For strong attractive impurity-medium couplings the impurity is bound to the bosonic bath, while for intermediate attractions it undergoes an effective tunneling. In the case of weak attractive or repul…
Topological quantum phases cannot be characterized by Ginzburg-Landau type order parameters, and are instead described by non-local topological invariants. Experimental platforms capable of realizing such exotic states now include "synthetic" many-body systems such as ultracold atoms or photons. Unique tools available in these systems enable a new characterization of strongly correlated many-body states. Here we propose a general scheme for detecting topological order using interferometric measurements of elementary excitations. The key ingredient is the use of mobile impurities which bind to …
The fastest possible collective response of a quantum many-body system is related to its excitations at the highest possible energy. In condensed-matter systems, the corresponding timescale is typically set by the Fermi energy. Taking advantage of fast and precise control of interactions between ultracold atoms, we report on the observation of ultrafast dynamics of impurities coupled to an atomic Fermi sea. Our interferometric measurements track the non-perturbative quantum evolution of a fermionic many-body system, revealing in real time the formation dynamics of quasiparticles and the quantu…
Mixing two kinds of particles that repel each other usually results in either a homogeneous mixture when the repulsion is weak, or a complete phase separation of the two kinds when their repulsion is too strong. It is shown however that there is an intermediate regime where the two kinds can coexist in their ground state as a bubble immersed in a gas of one kind. Such a situation is obtained by adding heavy repulsive impurities into a Bose-Einstein condensate. Above a certain strength of the mutual repulsion, a stable bubble of impurities and bosons can be formed, resulting from the equilibriu…
We investigate the nonequilibrium quantum dynamics of a single and two heavy fermionic impurities being harmonically trapped and repulsively interacting with a finite ensemble of majority fermions. A quench of the potential of the majority species from a double-well to a harmonic trap is applied, enforcing its counterflow which in turn perturbs the impurities. For weak repulsions it is shown that the mixture undergoes a periodic mixing and demixing dynamics, while stronger interactions lead to a more pronounced dynamical spatial separation. In the presence of correlations the impurity exhibits…
We unravel the nonequilibrium dynamics of two fermionic impurities immersed in a one-dimensional bosonic gas following an interspecies interaction quench from weak to strong repulsions. Monitoring the temporal evolution of the single-particle density of each species we reveal the existence of four distinct dynamical regimes. For weak interspecies repulsions both species either perform a breathing motion or the impurity density splits into two parts which interact and disperse within the bosonic cloud. Turning to strong interactions we observe the formation of dark-bright states within the mean…
The counterflow dynamics of two correlated impurities in a double-well coupled to an one-dimensional bosonic medium is explored. We determine the ground state phase diagram of the system according to the impurity-medium entanglement and the impurities two-body correlations. Specifically, bound impurity structures reminiscent of bipolarons for strong attractive couplings as well as configurations with two clustered or separated impurities in the repulsive case are identified. The interval of existence of these phases depends strongly on the impurity-impurity interactions and external confinemen…
Impurity physics is a traditional topic in condensed matter physics that nowadays is being explored in the field of ultracold gases. Among the different classes of impurities, we focus on charged impurities in an ultracold bath. When a single ion is brought in contact with an ultracold gas it is subjected to different reactive processes that can be understood from a cold chemistry approach. In this work, we present an outlook of approaches for the dynamics of a single ion in a bath of ultracold atoms or molecules, complementing the usual many-body approaches characteristic of impurity physics …
In this work we discuss the dynamical response of heavy quantum impurities immersed in a Fermi gas at zero and at finite temperature. Studying both the frequency and the time domain allows one to identify interaction regimes that are characterized by distinct many-body dynamics. From this theoretical study a picture emerges in which impurity dynamics is universal on essentially all time scales, and where the high-frequency few-body response is related to the long-time dynamics of the Anderson orthogonality catastrophe by Tan relations. Our theoretical description relies on different and comple…
We report on spin dynamics of individual, localized neutral impurities immersed in a Bose-Einstein condensate. Single Cesium atoms are transported into a cloud of Rubidium atoms, thermalize with the bath, and the ensuing spin-exchange between localized impurities with quasi-spin $F_i=3$ and bath atoms with $F_b=1$ is resolved. Comparing our data to numerical simulations of spin dynamics we find that, for gas densities in the BEC regime, the dynamics is dominated by the condensed fraction of the cloud. We spatially resolve the density overlap of impurities and gas by the spin-population of impu…
We study the correlated dynamics of few interacting bosonic impurities immersed in a one-dimensional harmonically trapped bosonic environment. The mixture is exposed to a time-dependent impurity-medium interaction pulse moving it across the relevant phase separation boundary. For modulation frequencies smaller than the trapping one, the system successively transits through the miscible/immiscible phases according to the driving of the impurity-medium interactions. For strong modulations, and driving from the miscible to the immiscible regime, a significant fraction of the impurities is expelle…
We investigate the system of a heavy impurity immersed in a degenerated Fermi gas, where the impurity's internal degree of freedom (pseudospin) is manipulated by a series of radiofrequency (RF) pulses at several different times. Applying the functional determinant approach, we carry out an essentially exact calculation of the Ramsey-interference-type responses to the RF pulses. These responses are universal functions of the multiple time intervals between the pulses for all time and can be regarded as multidimensional (MD) spectroscopy of the system in the time domain. A Fourier transformation…
We investigate the ground state properties and the nonequilibrium dynamics of a lattice trapped bosonic mixture consisting of an impurity species and a finite-sized medium. For the case of one as well as two impurities we observe that, depending on the lattice depth and the interspecies interaction strength, a transition from a strongly delocalized to a localized impurity distribution occurs. In the latter regime the two species phase separate, thereby forming a particle-hole pair. For two impurities we find that below a critical lattice depth they are delocalized among two neighboring outer l…
It is a common knowledge that an effective interaction of a quantum impurity with an electromagnetic field can be screened by surrounding charge carriers, whether mobile or static. Here we demonstrate that very strong, `anomalous' screening can take place in the presence of a neutral, weakly-polarizable environment, due to an exchange of orbital angular momentum between the impurity and the bath. Furthermore, we show that it is possible to generalize all phenomena related to isolated impurities in an external field to the case when a many-body environment is present, by casting the problem in …
We theoretically investigate the role of multiple impurity atoms on the ground state properties of Bose polarons. The Bogoliubov approximation is applied for the description of the condensate resulting in a Hamiltonian containing terms beyond the Fröhlich approximation. The many-body nature of the impurity atoms is taken into account by extending the many-body description for multiple Fröhlich polarons, revealing the static structure factor of the impurities as the key quantity. Within this formalism various experimentally accessible polaronic properties are calculated such as the energy and t…
We show how impurity atoms can measure moments of ultracold atomic gas densities, using the example of bosons in a one-dimensional lattice. This builds on a body of work regarding the probing of systems by measuring the dephasing of an immersed qubit. We show this dephasing is captured by a function resembling characteristic functions of probability theory, of which the derivatives at short times reveal moments of the system operator to which the qubit couples. For a qubit formed by an impurity atom, in a system of ultracold atoms, this operator can be the density of the system at the location…
We consider the dynamics of an impurity atom immersed in an ideal Fermi gas at zero temperature. We focus on the coherent quantum evolution of the impurity following a quench to strong impurity-fermion interactions, where the interactions are assumed to be short range like in cold-atom experiments. To approximately model the many-body time evolution, we use a truncated basis method, where at most two particle-hole excitations of the Fermi sea are included. When the system is initially non-interacting, we show that our method exactly captures the short-time dynamics following the quench, and we…
We explore the time evolution of two impurities in a trapped one-dimensional Bose gas that follows a change of the boson-impurity interaction. We study the induced impurity-impurity interactions and their effect on the quench dynamics. In particular, we report on the size of the impurity cloud, the impurity-impurity entanglement, and the impurity-impurity correlation function. The presented numerical simulations are based upon the variational multilayer multiconfiguration time-dependent Hartree method for bosons. To analyze and quantify induced impurity-impurity correlations, we employ an effe…
We present an approach to interacting quantum many-body systems based on the notion of quantum groups, also known as $q$-deformed Lie algebras. In particular, we show that if the symmetry of a free quantum particle corresponds to a Lie group $G$, in the presence of a many-body environment this particle can be described by a deformed group, $G_q$. Crucially, the single deformation parameter, $q$, contains all the information about the many-particle interactions in the system. We exemplify our approach by considering a quantum rotor interacting with a bath of bosons, and demonstrate that extract…
We introduce a Ramsey pulse scheme which extracts the non-Hermitian Hamiltonian associated to an arbitrary Lindblad dynamics. We propose a realted protocol to measure via interferometry a generalised Loschmidt echo of a generic state evolving in time with the non-Hermitian Hamiltonian itself, and we apply the scheme to a one-dimensional weakly interacting Bose gas coupled to a stochastic atomic impurity. The Loschmidt echo is mapped into a functional integral from which we calculate the long-time decohering dynamics at arbitrary impurity strengths. For strong dissipation we uncover the phenome…
We investigate numerically the problem of few (one, two) noninteracting spin$-1/2$ fermions in a shallow harmonic trap coupled via contact repulsive interactions to a uniform one-dimensional bath of lattice bosons, described by the Bose-Hubbard model. Through extensive density-matrix renormalization group calculations, we extract the binding energy and the effective mass of quasiparticles, including dressed impurities (polarons) and their two-body bound states (bipolarons), emerging from the effective non-local Casimir interaction between the impurities. We show that the mixture exhibits rathe…
A magnetic impurity in a fermionic superfluid hosts bound quasiparticle states known as Yu-Shiba-Rusinov (YSR) states. We argue here that, if the impurity is mobile (i.e., has a finite mass), the impurity and its bound YSR quasiparticle move together as a midgap molecule, which has an unusual "Mexican-hat" dispersion that is tunable via the fermion density. We map out the impurity dispersion, which consists of an "atomic" branch (in which the impurity is dressed by quasiparticle pairs) and a "molecular" branch (in which the impurity binds a quasiparticle). We discuss the experimental realizati…
The existence of a self-localization transition in the polaron problem has been under an active debate ever since Landau suggested it 83 years ago. Here we reveal the self-localization transition for the rotational analogue of the polaron -- the angulon quasiparticle. We show that, unlike for the polarons, self-localization of angulons occurs at finite impurity-bath coupling already at the mean-field level. The transition is accompanied by the spherical-symmetry breaking of the angulon ground state and a discontinuity in the first derivative of the ground-state energy. Moreover, the type of th…
Impurities in a Fermi sea, or Fermi polarons, experience a Casimir interaction induced by quantum fluctuations of the medium. When there is short-range attraction between impurities and fermions, also the induced interaction between two impurities is strongly attractive at short distance and oscillates in space for larger distances. We theoretically investigate the scattering properties and compute the scattering phase shifts and scattering lengths between two heavy impurities in an ideal Fermi gas at zero temperature. While the induced interaction between impurities is weakly attractive for w…
We prove that for a single-component many-body system at zero temperature the inequality $E_{\rm int} \leq\, P\,V$ holds, where $E_{\rm int}$ is the interaction energy, $P$ is pressure and $V$ is volume. This inequality is proven under rather general assumptions with the use of Anderson-type bound relating ground state energies of systems with different numbers of particles. We also consider adding impurity particles to the system and derive inequalities on the chemical potential of the impurity and binding energy of the bound state of two impurities.
Quantum Impurities as Probes of Finite-Temperature Fluctuations in Two-Dimensional Bose Gases
International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA)（高等研究院）；CINECA Consorzio Interuniversitario（意大利大学联合中心）；School of Science and Technology, Physics Division, Università di Camerino（卡梅里诺大学理学院物理系）；Pitaevskii BEC Center, CNR-INO, Trento（特伦托CNR-INO皮塔耶夫斯基玻色-爱因斯坦凝聚中心）；INFN, Sezione di Perugia（佩鲁贾国家核物理研究所）；School of Pharmacy, Physics Unit, University of Camerino（卡梅里诺大学药学院物理组）；Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Trieste（的里雅斯特大学物理系）；Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), Trieste Section（的里雅斯特国家核物理研究所）
The challenge of understanding the dynamics of a mobile impurity in an interacting quantum many-body medium comes from the necessity of including entanglement between the impurity and excited states of the environment in a wide range of energy scales. In this paper, we investigate the motion of a finite mass impurity injected into a three-dimensional quantum Bose fluid as it starts shedding Bogoliubov excitations. We uncover a transition in the dynamics as the impurity's velocity crosses a critical value which depends on the strength of the interaction between the impurity and bosons as well a…
We study the Hall response of topologically-trivial mobile impurities (Fermi polarons) interacting weakly with majority fermions forming a Chern-insulator background. This setting involves a rich interplay between the genuine many-body character of the polaron problem and the topological nature of the surrounding cloud. When the majority fermions are accelerated by an external field, a transverse impurity current can be induced. To quantify this polaronic Hall effect, we compute the drag transconductivity, employing controlled diagrammatic perturbation theory in the impurity-fermion interactio…
Mobile quantum impurities interacting with a fermionic bath form quasiparticles known as Fermi polarons. We demonstrate that a force applied to the bath particles can generate a drag force of similar magnitude acting on the impurities, realizing a novel, nonperturbative Coulomb drag effect. To prove this, we calculate the fully self-consistent, frequency-dependent transconductivity at zero temperature in the Baym-Kadanoff conserving approximation. We apply our theory to excitons and exciton polaritons interacting with a bath of charge carriers in a doped semiconductor embedded in a microcavity…
The Casimir effect, a two-body interaction via vacuum fluctuations, is a fundamental property of quantum systems. In solid state physics it emerges as a long-range interaction between two impurity atoms via virtual phonons. In the classical limit for the impurity atoms in $D$ dimensions the interaction is known to follow the universal power-law $U(r)\sim r^{-D}$. However, for finite masses of the impurity atoms on a lattice, it was predicted to be $U(r)\sim r^{-2D-1}$ at large distances. We examine how one power-law can change into another with increase of the impurity mass and in presence of …
We investigate the ground-state energy of a one-dimensional Fermi gas with two bosonic impurities. We consider spinless fermions with no fermion-fermion interactions. The fermion-impurity and impurity-impurity interactions are modelled with Dirac delta functions. First, we study the case where impurity and fermions have equal masses, and the impurity-impurity two-body interaction is identical to the fermion-impurity interaction, such that the system is solvable with the Bethe ansatz. For attractive interactions, we find that the energy of the impurity-impurity subsystem is below the energy of …
