Entangling lattice-trapped bosons with a free impurity: impact on stationary and dynamical properties

TL;DR

This paper investigates how a few lattice-trapped bosons interacting with an impurity influence each other's stationary and dynamical properties, revealing entanglement effects, phase separation, and sensitivity of impurity tunneling to interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of entanglement and correlations in a few-body impurity-boson system, highlighting effects on phase separation and tunneling dynamics.

Findings

Entanglement affects density distributions and phase separation.

Impurity tunneling period is highly sensitive to impurity-medium coupling.

Interactions can accelerate or oppose spatial localization depending on their nature.

Abstract

We address the interplay of few lattice trapped bosons interacting with an impurity atom in a box potential. For the ground state, a classification is performed based on the fidelity allowing to quantify the susceptibility of the composite system to structural changes due to the intercomponent coupling. We analyze the overall response at the many-body level and contrast it to the single-particle level. By inspecting different entropy measures we capture the degree of entanglement and intraspecies correlations for a wide range of intra- and intercomponent interactions and lattice depths. We also spatially resolve the imprint of the entanglement on the one- and two-body density distributions showcasing that it accelerates the phase separation process or acts against spatial localization for repulsive and attractive intercomponent interactions respectively. The many-body effects on the tunneling dynamics of the individual components, resulting from their counterflow, are also discussed. The tunneling period of the impurity is very sensitive to the value of the impurity-medium coupling due to its effective dressing by the few-body medium. Our work provides implications for engineering localized structures in correlated impurity settings using species selective optical potentials.