Interspecies entanglement with impurity atoms in a lattice gas

TL;DR

This paper studies how impurity atoms in a lattice gas become entangled with the majority species, affecting measurements, and explores how to use impurities as probes for many-body states in strongly interacting bosonic systems.

Contribution

It combines analytical and numerical methods to analyze interspecies entanglement effects and proposes regimes where impurities can serve as minimally invasive probes.

Findings

Interspecies entanglement influences measurement outcomes.

Impurities can be used to probe many-body states.

Regimes with minimal entanglement allow non-invasive measurements.

Abstract

The dynamics of impurity atoms introduced into bosonic gases in an optical lattice have generated a lot of recent interest, both in theory and experiment. We investigate to what extent measurements on either the impurity species or the majority species in these systems are affected by their interspecies entanglement. This arises naturally in the dynamics and plays an important role when we measure only one species. We explore the corresponding effects in strongly interacting regimes, using a combination of few-particle analytical calculations and Density Matrix Renormalisation group methods in one dimension. We identify how the resulting effects on impurities can be used to probe the many-body states of the majority species, and separately ask how to enter regimes where this entanglement is small, so that the impurities can be used as probes that do not significantly affect the majority species. The results are accessible in current experiments, and provide important considerations for the measurement of complex systems with using few probe atoms.