Strongly interacting impurities in a dilute Bose condensate

TL;DR

This paper investigates the properties of Bose polarons with strong, finite-range impurity-boson interactions, extending previous weak-interaction results to the unitary regime and providing explicit formulas for their energy and properties.

Contribution

It introduces a method to calculate static properties of Bose polarons with strong interactions, including finite-range effects, at and near unitarity, expanding beyond prior weak-coupling theories.

Findings

Properties depend on scattering length and interaction range parameter.

Explicit expressions for polaron energy at unitarity.

First correction to properties away from unitarity.

Abstract

An impurity in a Bose gas is commonly referred to as Bose polaron. For a dilute Bose gas its properties are expected to be universal, that is dependent only on a few parameters characterizing the boson-impurity interactions. When boson-impurity interactions are weak, it has been known for some time that the properties of the polaron depend only on the scattering length of these interactions. In this paper which accompanies and extends Ref. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 123403 (2021)] (where some of these results have already been reported) we examine stronger boson-impurity interactions, keeping their range finite. We demonstrate that for attractive interactions between impurity and the bosons up to and including the unitary point of these interactions, all static properties of a Bose polaron in a dilute Bose gas can be calculated in terms of the scattering length and an additional parameter which characterizes the range of the impurity-boson interactions. We show that our approach to this problem is valid if this parameter does not deviate too much from the scattering length of intra-boson interactions, with the precise criterion given in the text. We produce explicit expressions for the energy and other properties of polaron for the case when the impurity-boson scattering length is tuned to unitarity, and we also provide the first correction away from it.