Anomalous screening of quantum impurities by a neutral environment

TL;DR

This paper reveals that quantum impurities can experience strong, anomalous screening effects in neutral environments through angular momentum exchange, extending impurity physics to many-body contexts via the angulon quasiparticle.

Contribution

It introduces a novel mechanism of anomalous screening in neutral environments and generalizes impurity phenomena using the angulon quasiparticle framework.

Findings

Strong anomalous screening observed in neutral environments.

Impurity observables can be expressed via a single screening parameter.

Extension of impurity-field phenomena to many-body environments.

Abstract

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 terms of the angulon quasiparticle. As a result, the relevant observables such as the effective Rabi frequency, geometric phase, and impurity spatial alignment are straightforward to evaluate in terms of a single parameter: the angular-momentum-dependent screening factor.