Mobile Impurity in a Two-Leg Bosonic Ladder

TL;DR

This paper investigates the dynamics of a mobile impurity in a two-leg bosonic ladder using analytical and numerical methods, revealing mode-specific coupling, decay behaviors, and implications for ultracold gas experiments.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of impurity Green's functions in a two-leg bosonic ladder, combining TLL and DMRG methods, and explores the effects of impurity-bath interactions and tunneling.

Findings

Bonding mode couples only to gapless bath mode at small interactions.

Impurity Green's function decays as power-law below a critical momentum, exponential above.

Power-law decay with an exponent increasing with transverse tunneling.

Abstract

We study the dynamics of a mobile impurity in a two-leg bosonic ladder. The impurity moves both along and across the legs and interacts with a bath of interacting bosonic particles present in the ladder. We use both analytical (Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid - TLL) and numerical (Density Matrix Renormalization Group - DMRG) methods to compute the Green's function of the impurity. We find that for a small impurity-bath interaction, the bonding mode of the impurity effectively couples only to the gapless mode of the bath while the anti-bonding mode of the impurity couples to both gapped and gapless mode of the bath. We compute the time dependence of the Green's function of the impurity, for impurity created either in the anti-bonding or bonding mode with a given momentum. The later case leads to a decay as a power-law below a critical momentum and exponential above, while the former case always decays exponentially. We compare the DMRG results with analytical results using the linked cluster expansion and find a good agreement. In addition we use DMRG to extract the lifetime of the quasi-particle, when the Green's function decays exponentially. We also treat the case of an infinite bath-impurity coupling for which both the bonding and antibonding modes are systematically affected. For this case the impurity Green's function in the bonding mode decays as a power-law at zero momentum.The corresponding exponent increases with increasing transverse-tunneling of the impurity. We compare our results with the other impurity problems for which the motion of either the impurity or the bath is limited to a single chain. Finally we comments on the consequences of our findings for experiments with the ultracold gasses.