Ground state properties of ultracold trapped bosons with an immersed ionic impurity

TL;DR

This paper investigates how a trapped ion affects the ground state properties of an ultracold bosonic ensemble, revealing observable signatures in momentum distribution and interference patterns, using an exact numerical approach.

Contribution

It introduces a model for atom-ion interactions and applies a numerically exact method to analyze the ground state, highlighting the ion's influence on many-body quantum states.

Findings

Ion impedes the transition to the Thomas-Fermi regime for weakly interacting atoms.

Presence of the ion affects the momentum distribution and interference fringes.

Ion modifies the fragmentation process depending on atom number parity.

Abstract

We consider a trapped atomic ensemble of interacting bosons in the presence of a single trapped ion in a quasi one dimensional geometry. Our study is carried out by means of the newly developed multilayer-multiconfiguration time-dependent Hartree method for bosons, a numerical exact approach to simulate quantum many-body dynamics. In particular, we are interested in the scenario by which the ion is so strongly trapped that its motion can be effectively neglected. This enables us to focus on the atomic ensemble only. With the development of a model potential for the atom-ion interaction, we are able to numerically obtain the exact many-body ground state of the atomic ensemble in the presence of an ion. We analyse the influence of the atom number and the atom-atom interaction on the ground state properties. Interestingly, for weakly interacting atoms, we find that the ion impedes the transition from the ideal gas behaviour to the Thomas-Fermi limit. Furthermore, we show that this effect can be exploited to infer the presence of the ion both in the momentum distribution of the atomic cloud and by observing the interference fringes occurring during an expansion of the quantum gas. In the strong interacting regime, the ion modifies the fragmentation process in dependence of the atom number parity which allows a clear identification of the latter in expansion experiments. Hence, we propose in both regimes experimentally viable strategies to assess the impact of the ion on the many-body state of the atomic gas. This study serves as the first building block for systematically investigate many-body physics of such hybrid system.