Cooling and frequency shift of an impurity in a ultracold Bose gas using an open system approach

TL;DR

This paper models the dissipative quantum dynamics of an impurity in a Bose-Einstein condensate, revealing a superfluid Landau criterion and non-Markovian effects in the impurity's motion.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed non-Markovian open system approach to analyze impurity dynamics in a superfluid environment, deriving a quantum Landau criterion and memory effects.

Findings

Damping rate suppressed as $\omega^4$ below chemical potential

Identified a quantum Landau criterion for superfluidity

Observed non-Markovian memory effects in impurity dynamics

Abstract

We investigate the quantum dynamics of a harmonically trapped particle (e.g. an ion) that is immersed in a Bose--Einstein condensate. The ultracold environment acts as a refrigerator, and thus, the influence on the motion of the ion is dissipative. We study the fully coupled quantum dynamics of particle and Bose gas in a linearized regime, treating the quasi-particle excitations of the gas as a (non-Markovian) environment for the particle dynamics. The density operator of the latter follows a known non-Markovian master equation with a highly non-trivial bath correlation function that we determine and study in detail. The corresponding damping rate and frequency shift of the particle oscillations can be read off. We are able to identify a Quantum Landau criterion for harmonically trapped particles in a superfluid environment: for frequencies $\omega$ well below the chemical potential, the damping rate is strongly suppressed by a power law $\omega^4$. This criterion can be seen as emerging from the classical Landau criterion involving a critical velocity combined with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle for the localized wave packet of the quantum particle. Furthermore, due to the finite size of the Bose gas, after some time we observe memory effects and thus non-Markovian dynamics of the quantum oscillator.