# Diagrammatic approach to orbital quantum impurities interacting with a many-particle environment

## TL;DR

This paper develops a diagrammatic, path-integral approach to the angulon quasiparticle, enabling systematic perturbative calculations of its properties in complex many-particle environments.

## Contribution

It introduces a diagrammatic formalism extending angular momentum theory to many-body systems, simplifying calculations of angulon properties.

## Key findings

- Derived Feynman diagram rules for angulon interactions
- Calculated 1- and 2-loop contributions to the self-energy and spectral function
- Established a systematic framework for higher-order perturbative analysis

## Abstract

Recently it was shown that an impurity exchanging orbital angular momentum with a surrounding bath can be described in terms of the angulon quasiparticle [Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 095301 (2017)]. The angulon consists of a quantum rotor dressed by a many-particle field of boson excitations, and can be formed out of, for example, a molecule or a nonspherical atom in superfluid helium, or out of an electron coupled to lattice phonons or a Bose condensate. Here we develop an approach to the angulon based on the path-integral formalism, which sets the ground for a systematic, perturbative treatment of the angulon problem. The resulting perturbation series can be interpreted in terms of Feynman diagrams, from which, in turn, one can derive a set of diagrammatic rules. These rules extend the machinery of the graphical theory of angular momentum - well known from theoretical atomic spectroscopy - to the case where an environment with an infinite number of degrees of freedom is present. In particular, we show that each diagram can be interpreted as a 'skeleton', which enforces angular momentum conservation, dressed by an additional many-body contribution. This connection between the angulon theory and the graphical theory of angular momentum is particularly important as it allows to systematically and substantially simplify the analytical representation of each diagram. In order to exemplify the technique, we calculate the 1- and 2-loop contributions to the angulon self-energy, the spectral function, and the quasiparticle weight. The diagrammatic theory we develop paves the way to investigate next-to-leading order quantities in a more compact way compared to the variational approaches.