Polaronic dressing of bound states

TL;DR

This paper explores how the internal structure of impurities, specifically dimers, influences polaronic properties when coupled to a bosonic bath, revealing regimes where bound states become ill-defined due to dressing effects.

Contribution

It introduces a theoretical framework for analyzing polaronic dressing of dimers, extending impurity physics to structured particles and identifying new regimes of bound state behavior.

Findings

Identification of different dressed dimer regimes

Demonstration of polaron-driven transition from well-defined to ill-defined bound states

Solution of the impurity-impurity problem for dimer states

Abstract

Polarons have emerged as a powerful concept across many-fields in physics to study an impurity coupled to a quantum bath. The interplay between impurity physics and the formation of composite objects remains a relevant problem to understand how few- and many-body states are robust towards complex environments and polaron physics. In most cases, impurities are point-like objects. The question we address here is how quasiparticle properties are affected when impurities possess an internal structure. The simplest yet fundamental structure for the impurity is a dimer state. Here, we investigate the polaronic properties of a dimer dressed by the elementary excitations of a bosonic bath. We solve the two-body impurity-impurity problem to determine the position and broadening of the bound state and consider the polaron dressing using a field-theory approach. We demonstrate the emergence of different dressed dimer regimes, where polaron dressing drives a dimer from a well-defined to an ill-defined bound state.