Advancing our understanding of non-equilibrium phenomena in quantum many-body systems remains among 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 environment. 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 formation 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 behavior in interacting many-body systems and demonstrate new pathways to study non-equilibrium quantum phenomena.
We present an experimental system to study the Bose polaron by immersion of single, well-controllable neutral Cs impurities into a Rb Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). We show that, by proper optical traps, independent control over impurity and BEC allows for precision relative positioning of the two sub-systems as well as for independent read-out. We furthermore estimate that measuring the polaron binding energy of Fröhlich-type Bose polarons in the low and intermediate coupling regime is feasible with our experimental constraints and limitations discussed.
Polaronic hybridization of atoms, dimers and trimers in a Bose-Einstein condensate
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik（马克斯·普朗克量子光学研究所）；Munich Center for Quantum Science and Technology (MCQST)（慕尼黑量子科学与技术中心）；Heidelberg University（海德堡大学）
We investigate the polarons formed by immersing a spinor impurity in a ferromagnetic state of $F=1$ spinor Bose-Einstein condensate. The ground state energies and effective masses of the polarons are calculated in both weak-coupling regime and strong-coupling regime. In the weakly interacting regime the second order perturbation theory is performed. In the strong coupling regime we use a simple variational treatment. The analytical approximations to the energy and effective mass of the polarons are constructed. Especially, a transition from the mobile state to the self-trapping state of the po…
The application of optical lattices allows a tuning of the geometry of Bose-Einstein condensates to effectively reduced dimensions. In the context of solid state physics the consideration of the low-dimensional Fröhlich polaron results in an extension of the polaronic strong coupling regime. With this motivation we apply the Jensen-Feynman variational principle to calculate the ground state properties of the polaron consisting of an impurity in a Bose-Einstein condensate in reduced dimensions. Also the response of this system to Bragg scattering is calculated. We show that reducing the dimensi…
We report spectroscopic observation of Rydberg polarons in an atomic Bose gas. Polarons are created by excitation of Rydberg atoms as impurities in a strontium Bose-Einstein condensate. They are distinguished from previously studied polarons by macroscopic occupation of bound molecular states that arise from scattering of the weakly bound Rydberg electron from ground-state atoms. The absence of a $p$-wave resonance in the low-energy electron-atom scattering in Sr introduces a universal behavior in the Rydberg spectral lineshape and in scaling of the spectral width (narrowing) with the Rydberg …
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…
The properties of a Bose polaron immersed in a dilute two-dimensional medium at finite temperatures are discussed. Assuming that the impurity is weakly-coupled to the bath particles we have perturbatively calculated the polaron energy, effective mass, quasiparticle residue and damping rate. The parameters of impurity spectrum are found to be well-defined in the whole temperature region whereas the pole structure of the impurity Green's function is visible only at absolute zero. At any finite temperatures the quasiparticle residue is logarithmically divergent signalling of the branch-cut behavi…
We study degenerate mixtures of "heavy" bosons and "light" superfluid bosons using a variational polaron transformation. We consider the Mott insulator-superfluid transition of the heavy species and find that at $T=0$ interaction favors the superfluid phase of the heavy species. Our analytic results agree well with numerically exact quantum Monte Carlo simulations in two dimensions. We then show that in three dimensions the variational polaron transformation can be combined with a Gutzwiller approximation to give good results.
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 coupling and separation $r$. At $r\lesssim ξ$, where $ξ$ 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 $r\ggξ$. At suc…
The properties of impurity immersed in the dilute $D$-dimensional Bose gas at temperatures close to the second-order phase transition point are considered. Particularly by means of the $1/N$-expansion we calculated the leading-order polaron energy and the damping rate in the limit of vanishing boson-boson interaction. It is show that the perturbative effective mass and the quasiparticle residue diverge logarithmically in the long-length limit signalling the non-analytic behavior of impurity spectrum and a non-pole structure of a polaron Green's function in the infrared region, respectively.
We generalize the application of small polaron theory to ultracold gases of Ref. [\onlinecite{jaksch_njp1}] to the case of Bose-Fermi mixtures, where both components are loaded into an optical lattice. In a suitable range of parameters, the mixture can be described within a Bogoliubov approach in the presence of fermionic (dynamic) impurities and an effective description in terms of polarons applies. In the dilute limit of the slow impurity regime, the hopping of fermionic particles is exponentially renormalized due to polaron formation, regardless of the sign of the Bose-Fermi interaction. Th…
The weak coupling many-polaron formalism is applied to the case of the polaronic system consisting of impurities in a Bose-Einstein condensate. This allows to investigate the groundstate properties and the response of the system to Bragg spectroscopy. This theory is then applied to the system of spin-polarized fermionic lithium-6 impurities in a sodium condensate. The Bragg spectrum reveals a peak which corresponds to the emission of Bogoliubov excitations. Both ground state properties and the response spectrum show that the polaronic effect vanishes at large densities. We also look at two pos…
We theoretically investigate the quasiparticle (polaron) properties of an impurity immersing in a Bose-Einstein condensate with equal Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling at zero temperature. In the presence of spin-orbit coupling, all bosons can condense into a single plane-wave state with finite momentum, and the corresponding excitation spectrum shows an intriguing roton minimum. We find that the polaron properties are strongly modified by this roton minimum, where the ground state of attractive polaron acquires a nonzero momentum and anisotropic effective mass. Across the resonance o…
Polaron quasiparticles are formed when a mobile impurity is coupled to the elementary excitations of a many-particle background. In the field of ultracold atoms, the study of the associated impurity problem has attracted a growing interest over the last fifteen years. Polaron quasiparticle properties are essential to our understanding of a variety of paradigmatic quantum many-body systems realized in ultracold atomic gases and in the solid state, from imbalanced Bose-Fermi and Fermi-Fermi mixtures to fermionic Hubbard models. In this topical review, we focus on the so-called repulsive polaron …
We present a quantum many-body description of the excitation spectrum of Rydberg polarons in a Bose gas. The many-body Hamiltonian is solved with functional determinant theory, and we extend this technique to describe Rydberg polarons of finite mass. Mean-field and classical descriptions of the spectrum are derived as approximations of the many-body theory. The various approaches are applied to experimental observations of polarons created by excitation of Rydberg atoms in a strontium Bose-Einstein condensate.
We use variational methods to study a spin impurity in a 1D Bose lattice gas. Both in the strongly interacting superfluid regime and the Mott regime we find that the impurity binds with a hole, forming a polaron. Our calculations for the dispersion of the polaron are consistent with recent experiments by Fukuhara et. al. [Nature Phys. 9, 235 (2013)] and give a better understanding of their numerical simulations. We find that for sufficiently weak interactions there are ranges of momentum for which the polaron is unstable. We propose experimentally studying the stability of the polaron by measu…
The detailed mean-field treatment of the Bose polaron problem in two and three dimensions is presented. Particularly, assuming that impurity is immersed in the dilute Bose gas and interacts with bosons via the hard-sphere two-body potential, we calculate the low-momentum parameters of its spectrum, namely, the binding energy and the effective mass. The limits of applicability of the mean-field approach to a problem of mobile impurity in Bose-Einstein condensates are discussed by comparing our results to the Monte Carlo simulations data.
We use a class of variational wave functions to study the properties of an impurity in a Bose-Einstein condensate, i.e. the "Bose polaron". The impurity interacts with the condensate through a contact interaction, which can be tuned by a Feshbach resonance. We find a stable attractive polaron branch that evolves continuously across the resonance to a tight-binding diatomic molecule deep in the positive scattering length side. A repulsive polaron branch with finite lifetime is also observed and it becomes unstable as the interaction strength increases. The effective mass of the attractive polar…
The full momentum dependence of spectrum of a point-like impurity immersed in a dilute one-dimensional Bose gas is calculated on the mean-field level. In particular we elaborate, to the finite-momentum Bose polaron, the path-integral approach whose semi-classical approximation leads to the conventional mean-field treatment of the problem while quantum corrections can be easily accounted by standard loop expansion techniques. The extracted low-energy parameters of impurity spectrum, namely, the binding energy and the effective mass of particle, are shown to be in qualitative agreement with the …
We study the Bose polaron problem in a nonequilibrium setting, by considering an impurity embedded in a quantum fluid of light realized by exciton-polaritons in a microcavity, subject to a coherent drive and dissipation on account of pump and cavity losses. We obtain the polaron effective mass, the drag force acting on the impurity, and determine polaron trajectories at a semiclassical level. We find different dynamical regimes, originating from the unique features of the excitation spectrum of driven-dissipative polariton fluids, in particular a non-trivial regime of acceleration against the …
We discuss the interaction of a quantum impurity with a one-dimensional degenerate Bose gas forming a Bose-polaron. In three spatial dimensions the quasiparticle is typically well described by the extended Fröhlich model, in full analogy with the solid-state counterpart. This description, which assumes an undepleted condensate, fails however in 1D, where the backaction of the impurity on the condensate leads to a self-bound mean-field polaron for arbitrarily weak impurity-boson interactions. We present a model that takes into account this backaction and describes the impurity-condensate intera…
We study the properties of the Bose polaron, an impurity strongly interacting with a Bose-Einstein condensate, using a field-theoretic approach and make predictions for the spectral function and various quasiparticle properties that can be tested in experiment. We find that most of the spectral weight is contained in a coherent attractive and a metastable repulsive polaron branch. We show that the qualitative behavior of the Bose polaron is well described by a non-selfconsistent T-matrix approximation by comparing analytical results to numerical data obtained from a fully selfconsistent T-matr…
We study the properties of a single impurity in a dilute Bose gas, a Bose polaron, using the functional renormalization group. We use an ansatz for the effective action motivated by a derivative expansion, and we compute the energies of the attractive and repulsive branches of excitations in both two and three spatial dimensions. Three-body correlations play an important role in the attractive branch, and we account for those by including three-body couplings between two bath bosons and the impurity. Our calculations compare very favorably with state-of-the-art experimental measurements and nu…
We study the polaron quasiparticle in a one-dimensional Bose gas. In the integrable case described by the Yang-Gaudin model, we derive an exact result for the polaron mass in the thermodynamic limit. It is expressed in terms of the derivative with respect to the density of the ground-state energy per particle of the Bose gas without the polaron. This enables us to find high-order power series for the polaron mass in the regimes of weak and strong interaction.
We consider a quantum impurity immersed in a dipolar Bose Einstein condensate and study the properties of the emerging polaron. We calculate the energy, effective mass and quasi-particle residue of the dipolar polaron and investigate their behaviour with respect to the strength of zero-range contact and a long-range dipolar interactions among the condensate atoms and with the impurity. While quantum fluctuations in the case of pure contact interactions typically lead to an increase of the polaron energy, dipole-dipole interactions are shown to cause a sign reversal. The described signatures of…
The temperature dependence of a mobile impurity in a dilute Bose gas, the Bose polaron, is investigated for wide a range of impurity-bath interactions. Using a diagrammatic resummation scheme designed to include scattering processes important at finite temperature $T$, we show that the phase transition of the environment to a Bose-Einstein condensate at the critical temperature $T_c$ leads to several non-trivial effects. The attractive polaron present at $T=0$ fragments into two quasiparticle states for finite temperature whenever $|a|\gtrsim a_B$, with $a$ and $a_B$ the impurity-boson and bos…
The interaction between a mobile quantum impurity and a bosonic bath leads to the formation of quasiparticles, termed Bose polarons. The elementary properties of Bose polarons, such as their mutual interactions, can differ drastically from those of the bare impurities. Here, we explore Bose polaron physics in a two-dimensional nonequilibrium setting by injecting $σ^-$ polarised exciton-polariton impurities into a bath of coherent $σ^+$ polarised polaritons generated by resonant laser excitation of monolayer MoSe$_2$ embedded in an optical cavity. By exploiting a biexciton Feshbach resonance be…
We describe the ground state of a large, dilute, neutral atom Bose- Einstein condensate (BEC) doped with N strongly coupled mutually indistinguishable, bosonic neutral atoms (referred to as "impurity") in the polaron regime where the BEC density response to the impurity atoms remains significantly smaller than the average density of the surrounding BEC. We find that N impurity atoms (N is not one) can self-localize at a lower value of the impurity-boson interaction strength than a single impurity atom. When the 'bare' short-range impurity-impurity repulsion does not play a significant role, th…
We study the effect of Efimov physics (in the few-body sector) to the spectral response of Bose polaron, a many-body system consisting of an impurity immersed in a bath of bosonic atoms. We find that the Efimov correlation can be greatly enhanced by increasing the mass ratio between the bosons and the impurity, which results in visible signatures in the rf spectrum of the polaron. Using a diagrammatic approach up to the third-order virial expansion, we show how the mass imbalance and the enhanced three-body effect modify the line shape and the width of the polaron spectrum. Moreover, we study …
The emergence of quasiparticles in strongly interacting matter represents one of the cornerstones of modern physics. However, when different phases of matter compete near a quantum critical point, the very existence of quasiparticles comes under question. Here we create Bose polarons near quantum criticality by immersing atomic impurities in a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) with near-resonant interactions. Using locally-resolved radiofrequency spectroscopy, we probe the energy, spectral width, and short-range correlations of the impurities as a function of temperature. Far below the superfluid…
We investigate the non-equilibrium dynamics of an impurity coupled to a Bose-Einstein condensate, systematically compared with recent experimental results [M. G. Skou et al., Nat. Phys. (2021)]. The dynamics of the impurity is tracked down by using a time-dependent variational coherent ansatz. For weak coupling between the impurity and the bath, analytical expressions for the time-dependent overlap (or contrast) are derived, matching quite well with previous findings obtained within a master equation approach. For strong coupling instead, the variational ansatz provides a good quantitative des…
The variational Feynman formalism for the polaron, extended to an all-coupling treatment of bipolarons, is applied for two impurity atoms in a Bose-Einstein condensate. This shows that if the polaronic coupling strength is large enough the impurities will form a bound state (the bipolaron). As a function of the mutual repulsion between the impurities two types of bipolaron are distinguished: a tightly bound bipolaron at weak repulsion and a dumbbell bipolaron at strong repulsion. Apart from the binding energy, also the evolution of the bipolaron radius and its effective mass are examined as a …
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 RF 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, e…
The mobile impurity in a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) is a paradigmatic many-body problem. For weak interaction between the impurity and the BEC, the impurity deforms the BEC only slightly and it is well described within the Fröhlich model and the Bogoliubov approximation. For strong local attraction this standard approach, however, fails to balance the local attraction with the weak repulsion between the BEC particles and predicts an instability where an infinite number of bosons is attracted toward the impurity. Here we present a solution of the Bose polaron problem beyond the Bogoliubov a…
We study the quantum phases of one-dimensional Bose-Fermi mixtures in optical lattices. Assuming repulsive interparticle interactions, equal mass, and unit total filling, we calculate the ground-state phase diagram by means of both Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid theory and time-evolving block decimation method. We demonstrate the existence of a counterflow superfluid (CFSF) phase of polaron pairs, which are composite particles consisting of two fermions and two bosonic holes, in a broad range of the parameter space. We find that this phase naturally emerges in $^{174}$Yb-$^{173}$Yb mixtures, realiz…
We monitor the correlated quench induced dynamical dressing of a spinor impurity repulsively interacting with a Bose-Einstein condensate. Inspecting the temporal evolution of the structure factor three distinct dynamical regions arise upon increasing the interspecies interaction. These regions are found to be related to the segregated nature of the impurity and to the ohmic character of the bath. It is shown that the impurity dynamics can be described by an effective potential that deforms from a harmonic to a double-well one when crossing the miscibility-immiscibility threshold. In particular…
When an impurity interacts with a bath of phonons it forms a polaron. For increasing interaction strengths the mass of the polaron increases and it can become self-trapped. For impurity atoms inside an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) the nature of this transition is subject of debate. While Feynman's variational approach predicts a sharp transition for light impurities, renormalization group studies always predict an extended intermediate-coupling region characterized by large phonon correlations. To investigate this intricate regime we suggest a versatile experimental setup that allows …
We study the diffusive behavior of a Bose polaron immersed in a coherently coupled two-component Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC). Polaron superdiffuses if it couples in the same manner to both components, i.e. either attractively or repulsively to both of them. This is the same behavior as that of an impurity immersed in a single BEC. Conversely, the polaron exhibits a transient nontrivial subdiffusive behavior if it couples attractively to one of the components and repulsively to the other. The anomalous diffusion exponent and the duration of the subdiffusive interval can be controlled with th…
We investigate the formation of magnetic Bose polaron, an impurity atom dressed by spin-wave excitations, in a one-dimensional spinor Bose gas. In terms of an effective potential model the impurity is strongly confined by the host excitations which can even overcome the impurity-medium repulsion leading to a self-localized quasi-particle state. The phase diagram of the attractive and self-bound repulsive magnetic polaron, repulsive non-magnetic (Fr{\" o}hlich-type) polaron and impurity-medium phase-separation regimes is explored with respect to the Rabi-coupling between the spin components, sp…
The Bose polaron is a quasi-particle of an impurity dressed by surrounding bosons. In few-body physics, it is known that two identical bosons and a third distinguishable particle can form a sequence of Efimov bound states in the vicinity of inter-species scattering resonance. On the other hand, in the Bose polaron system with an impurity atom embedded in many bosons, no signature of Efimov physics has been reported in the existing spectroscopy measurements up to date. In this work, we propose that a large mass imbalance between a light impurity and heavy bosons can help produce visible signatu…
An impurity immersed in a Bose-Einstein condensate is no longer accurately described by the Fröhlich Hamiltonian as the coupling between the impurity and the boson bath gets stronger. We study the dominant effects of the two-phonon terms beyond the Fröhlich model on the ground-state properties of the polaron using Feynman's variational path-integral approach. The previously reported discrepancy in the effective mass between the renormalization group approach and this theory is shown to be absent in the beyond-Fröhlich model on the positive side of the Feshbach resonance. Self-trapping, charact…
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-d…
We discuss properties of a single impurity atom immersed in the spin-$1/2$ dilute Fermi gas with equal populations of two species in the deep Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) phase. In this limit, when an almost undepleted BEC of the tightly bound molecules of spin-up and spin-down fermions is formed, we calculate the parameters of an impurity spectrum. It is justified that the leading-order contribution to the impurity energy, while being determined by the two- and three-body scattering processes, is dominated by the former ones.
Recently, two independent experiments reported the observation of long-lived polarons in a Bose-Einstein condensate, providing an excellent setting to study the generic scenario of a mobile impurity interacting with a quantum reservoir. Here, we expand the experimental analysis by disentangling the effects of trap inhomogeneities and the many-body continuum in one of these experiments. This makes it possible to extract the energy of the polaron at a well-defined density as a function of the interaction strength. Comparisons with quantum Monte-Carlo as well as diagrammatic calculations show goo…
We investigate the crossover of the impurity-induced dynamics, in trapped one-dimensional Bose polarons subject to radio frequency (rf) pulses of varying intensity, from an adiabatic to a diabatic regime. Utilizing adiabatic pulses for either weak repulsive or attractive impurity-medium interactions, a multitude of polaronic excitations or mode-couplings of the impurity-bath interaction with the collective breathing motion of the bosonic medium are spectrally resolved. We find that for strongly repulsive impurity-bath interactions, a temporal orthogonality catastrophe manifests in resonances i…
Spectroscopic and interferometric measurements complement each other in extracting the fundamental properties of quantum many-body systems. While spectroscopy provides precise measurements of equilibrated energies, interferometry can elucidate the dynamical evolution of the system. For an impurity immersed in a bosonic medium, both are equally important for understanding the quasiparticle physics of the Bose polaron. Here, we compare the interferometric and spectroscopic timescales to the underlying dynamical regimes of the impurity dynamics and the polaron lifetime, highlighting the capabilit…
The notion of a polaron, originally introduced in the context of electrons in ionic lattices, helps us to understand how a quantum impurity behaves when being immersed in and interacting with a many-body background. We discuss the impact of the impurities on the medium particles by considering feedback effects from polarons that can be realized in ultracold quantum gas experiments. In particular, we exemplify the modifications of the medium in the presence of either Fermi or Bose polarons. Regarding Fermi polarons we present a corresponding many-body diagrammatic approach operating at finite t…
