Dynamics of a mobile impurity in a two-leg bosonic ladder

Abstract

We have analyzed the behavior of a mobile quantum impurity in a bath formed by a two-leg bosonic ladder by a combination of field theory (Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid) and numerical (Density Matrix Renormalization Group) techniques. Computing the Green's function of the impurity as a function of time at different momenta, we find a power law decay at zero momentum, which signals the breakdown of any quasi-particle description of the impurity motion. We compute the exponent both for the limits of weak and strong impurity-bath interactions. At small impurity-bath interaction, we find that the impurity experiences the ladder as a single channel one-dimensional bath, but effective coupling is reduced by a factor of $\sqrt 2$, thus the impurity is less mobile in the ladder compared to a one dimensional bath. We compared the numerical results for the exponent at zero momentum with a semi-analytical expression that was initially established for the chain and find excellent agreement without adjustable parameters. We analyze the dependence of the exponent in the transverse hopping in the bath and find surprisingly an increase of the exponent at variance with the naive extrapolation of the single channel regime. We study the momentum dependence of the impurity Green's function and find that, as for the single chain, two different regime of motion exist, one dominated by infrared metatrophy and a more conventional polaronic behavior. We compute the critical momentum between these two regimes and compare with prediction based on the structure factor of the bath. In the polaronic regime we also compute numerically the lifetime of the polaron. Finally we discuss how our results could be measured in cold atomic experiments.