Synthetic superfluid chemistry with vortex-trapped quantum impurities

TL;DR

This paper investigates how two-dimensional vortices in superfluids can trap quantum impurities, revealing shape deformations and energy effects that enable simulation of synthetic chemical reactions.

Contribution

It introduces a theoretical model of vortex-trapped impurities in superfluids, demonstrating shape deformation, energy splitting, and covalent bond-like states for vortex pairs.

Findings

Vortices deform into barrel shapes with mass imbalance.

Impurity vortex pair energies depend on mass, showing splitting.

Excited impurity states enable synthetic chemical reaction simulation.

Abstract

We explore the effect of using two-dimensional matter-wave vortices to confine an ensemble of bosonic quantum impurities. This is modelled theoretically using a mass-imbalanced homogeneous two component Gross-Pitaevskii equation where each component has independent atom numbers and equal atomic masses. By changing the mass imbalance of our system we find the shape of the vortices are deformed even at modest imbalances, leading to barrel shaped vortices; which we quantify using a multi-component variational approach. The energy of impurity carrying vortex pairs are computed, revealing a mass-dependent energy splitting. We then compute the excited states of the impurity, which we in turn use to construct `covalent bonds' for vortex pairs. Our work opens a new route to simulating synthetic chemical reactions with superfluid systems.