Tunable Fr\"ohlich Polarons of slow-light polaritons in a two-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensate

TL;DR

This paper investigates tunable Fröhlich polarons formed by slow-light polaritons in a 2D Bose-Einstein condensate, combining experimental setup proposals with theoretical renormalization group analysis to explore impurity-phonon interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a versatile experimental platform to tune impurity mass and interactions in a BEC and extends a renormalization group approach to analyze photonic polarons.

Findings

Predicted a tunable transition between free and self-trapped polarons.

Extended the renormalization group method to the Bogoliubov-Fröhlich Hamiltonian.

Provided theoretical insights into impurity-phonon interactions in a 2D BEC.

Abstract

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 to tune both the mass of the impurity and its interactions with the BEC. The impurity is realized as a dark-state polariton (DSP) inside a quasi two-dimensional BEC. We show that its interactions with the Bogoliubov phonons lead to photonic polarons, described by the Bogoliubov-Fr\"ohlich Hamiltonian, and make theoretical predictions using an extension of a recently introduced renormalization group approach to Fr\"ohlich polarons.