Impurity in a Bose-Einstein condensate: study of the attractive and repulsive branch using quantum Monte-Carlo methods

TL;DR

This study uses quantum Monte-Carlo methods to analyze impurity behavior in a Bose-Einstein condensate, focusing on attractive and repulsive interactions, and provides insights into effective mass, binding energy, and structural properties at zero temperature.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed quantum Monte-Carlo analysis of impurity properties in a Bose gas, exploring both attractive and repulsive interaction regimes with new insights into effective mass and binding energy.

Findings

Effective mass remains below twice the impurity's bare mass at unitarity.

Binding energy scales with n^{2/3}/m at unitarity.

Structural properties like the impurity-boson contact are characterized.

Abstract

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 $a$, 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 $b$ 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 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 $\hbar^2n^{2/3}/m$, where $n$ is the density of the bath and $m$ 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 small concentrations are also discussed.