Boson-boson Interaction Research Articles

Influence of a static electric field on a one-dimensional Bose-Fermi mixture confined in a double-well potential

In this study, we conducted a detailed investigation into the time evolution of the probability density within a 1D double-well potential hosting a Bose-Fermi mixture. This system comprised spinless bosons and spin one-half fermions with weak repulsive contact interactions. Notably, even at very low effective coupling constants, periodic probabilities were observed, indicating correlated tunneling of both bosons and fermions, leading to complete miscibility, which disappears when an external electric field is turned on. The electric field accentuated fermion-fermion interactions due to the Pauli exclusion principle, altering both boson density and interactions and leading to spatial redistribution of particles. These findings underscore the complex interplay between interactions, external fields, and spatial distributions within confined quantum systems. Our exploration of higher interaction strengths revealed conditions under which probability density functions are decoupled. Furthermore, we observed that increased fermion interaction, driven by the electric field, led to higher tunneling frequencies for both species because of the repulsive nature of the boson-fermion interaction. Conversely, increased boson-boson interaction resulted in complete tunneling of both species, especially when boson density was high, leading to effective fermion repulsion. Expanding our analysis to scenarios involving four bosons demonstrated that higher interaction values corresponded to increased oscillation frequencies in tunneling probabilities. Finally, by manipulating interaction parameters and activating the electric field, we achieved complete tunneling of both species, further increasing oscillation frequencies and resulting in intervals characterized by overlapping probability functions.

Entanglement transition through Hilbert-space localization

We study Hilbert-space localization of the many-body dynamics due to ergodicity breaking and analyze this effect in terms of the entanglement entropy and the entanglement spectrum. We find a transition from a regime driven by quantum tunneling to a regime that is dominated by boson-boson interaction, where the latter exhibits ergodicity breaking. Properties of this transition are captured by observation time averaging, which effectively suppresses the large dynamical entanglement fluctuations near the critical point. We employ this approach to the experimentally available bosonic Josephson junction. In this example, the transition from a tunneling regime to Hilbert-space localization reveals clear signatures in the entanglement entropy and entanglement spectrum. Interestingly, the transition point is reduced by quantum effects in comparison to the well-known result of the mean-field approximation in the form of self-trapping. This indicates that quantum fluctuations reduce the classical self-trapping. Different scaling with respect to the number of bosons, $N$, is found in the tunneling and the localization regime: While the entanglement entropy grows logarithmically with $N$ in the tunneling regime, it increases linearly in the localized regime. Our results indicate that entanglement provides a concept for a sensitive diagnosis for the transition from a quantum tunneling regime to Hilbert-space localization.

Creating a noninteracting Bose gas in equilibrium at finite temperature

Experiments with ultracold atoms involve interatomic interactions, which are essential for cooling the atoms. The $s$-wave interaction between atoms can be tuned via the Feshbach resonance, potentially enabling the creation of a noninteracting system when the interaction reaches its vanishing limit. Although feasible at zero temperature, eliminating the interaction at a finite temperature in an isolated system prevents the system from reaching equilibrium. In this study, we used a Bose-Fermi mixture to create equilibrated noninteracting Bose gas at a finite temperature. First, we used the Bose-Fermi superfluid mixture of a dilute lithium gas in an optical dipole trap to determine the zero crossing of the boson-boson interaction at near-zero temperature. Thereafter, we showed that the noninteracting Bose gas created at a finite temperature represents an ideal Bose gas under the canonical description. The results of this study provides an avenue for experimental investigations of the fundamental properties of an ideal Bose gas in a harmonic trap.

Polaron Interactions and Bipolarons in One-Dimensional Bose Gases in the Strong Coupling Regime

Bose polarons, quasiparticles composed of mobile impurities surrounded by cold Bose gas, can experience strong interactions mediated by the many-body environment and form bipolaron bound states. Here we present a detailed study of heavy polarons in a one-dimensional Bose gas by formulating a nonperturbative theory and complementing it with exact numerical simulations. We develop an analytic approach for weak boson-boson interactions and arbitrarily strong impurity-boson couplings. Our approach is based on a mean-field theory that accounts for deformations of the superfluid by the impurities and in this way minimizes quantum fluctuations. The mean-field equations are solved exactly in the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, leading to an analytic expression for the interaction potential of heavy polarons, which is found to be in excellent agreement with quantum MonteCarlo (QMC) results. In the strong coupling limit, the potential substantially deviates from the exponential form valid for weak coupling and has a linear shape at short distances. Taking into account the leading-order Born-Huang corrections, we calculate bipolaron binding energies for impurity-boson mass ratios as low as 3 and find excellent agreement with QMC results.

Arbitrary synthetic dimensions via multiboson dynamics on a one-dimensional lattice

The synthetic dimension, a research topic of both fundamental significance and practical applications, has been attracting increasing attention in recent years. In this paper, we propose a theoretical framework to construct arbitrary synthetic dimensions, or N-boson synthetic lattices, using multiple bosons on one-dimensional lattices. We show that a one-dimensional lattice hosting N indistinguishable bosons can be mapped to a single boson on an N-dimensional lattice with high symmetry. Band structure analyses on this N-dimensional lattice can then be mathematically performed to predict the existence of exotic eigenstates and the motion of N-boson wave packets. As illustrative examples, we demonstrate the edge states in two-boson Su-Schrieffer-Heeger synthetic lattices without interactions, interface states in two-boson Su-Schrieffer-Heeger synthetic lattices with interactions, and weakly bound triplon states in three-boson tight-binding synthetic lattices with interactions. The interface states and weakly bound triplon states have not been thoroughly understood in previous research. Our proposed theoretical framework hence provides an interesting perspective to explore the multiboson dynamics on lattices with boson-boson interactions, and opens up a future avenue in the field of multiboson manipulation in quantum engineering.

Quantum Behavior of a Heavy Impurity Strongly Coupled to a Bose Gas.

We investigate the problem of an infinitely heavy impurity interacting with a dilute Bose gas at zero temperature. When the impurity-boson interactions are short-ranged, we show that boson-boson interactions induce a quantum blockade effect, where a single boson can effectively block or screen the impurity potential. Since this behavior depends on the quantum granular nature of the Bose gas, it cannot be captured within a standard classical-field description. Using a combination of exact quantum MonteCarlo methods and a truncated basis approach, we show how the quantum correlations between bosons lead to universal few-body bound states and a logarithmically slow dependence of the polaron ground-state energy on the boson-boson scattering length. Moreover, we expose the link between the polaron energy and the spatial structure of the quantum correlations, spanning the infrared to ultraviolet physics.

Impurities in a one-dimensional Bose gas: the flow equation approach

A few years ago, flow equations were introduced as a technique for calculating the ground-state energies of cold Bose gases with and without impurities[1,2]. In this paper, we extend this approach to compute observables other than the energy. As an example, we calculate the densities, and phase fluctuations of one-dimensional Bose gases with one and two impurities. For a single mobile impurity, we use flow equations to validate the mean-field results obtained upon the Lee-Low-Pines transformation. We show that the mean-field approximation is accurate for all values of the boson-impurity interaction strength as long as the phase coherence length is much larger than the healing length of the condensate. For two static impurities, we calculate impurity-impurity interactions induced by the Bose gas. We find that leading order perturbation theory fails when boson-impurity interactions are stronger than boson-boson interactions. The mean-field approximation reproduces the flow equation results for all values of the boson-impurity interaction strength as long as boson-boson interactions are weak.

Quantum Droplets in a Mixture of Bose–Fermi SuperfluidsSupported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 11974331, 11421092 and 11534014, and the National Key Research and Development Program of China under Grant Nos. 2016YFA0301700, 2017YFA0304100, 2018YFA0307600 and 2016YFA0300603.

We study the formation of quantum droplets in the mixture of a single-component Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC), and a two-species Fermi superfluid across a wide Feshbach resonance. With repulsive boson-boson and attractive boson-fermion interactions, we show that quantum droplets can be stabilized by attractive fermion-fermion interactions on the Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer (BCS) side of the resonance, and can also exist in the deep BEC regime under weak boson-fermion interactions. We map out the phase diagram for stable droplets with respect to the boson-boson and boson-fermion interactions, and discuss the role of different types of quantum fluctuations in the relevant regions of the BCS-BEC crossover. Our work reveals the impact of fermion pairing on the formation of quantum droplets in Bose–Fermi mixtures, and provides a useful guide for future experiments.

Fate of the Bose polaron at finite temperature

We consider an impurity immersed in a Bose-Einstein condensate with tunable boson-impurity interactions. Such a Bose polaron has recently been predicted to exhibit an intriguing energy spectrum at finite temperature, where the ground-state quasiparticle evenly splits into two branches as the temperature is increased from zero [Guenther et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 050405 (2018)]. To investigate this theoretical prediction, we employ a recently developed variational approach that systematically includes multibody correlations between the impurity and the finite-temperature medium, thus allowing us to go beyond previous finite-temperature methods. Crucially, we find that the number of quasiparticle branches is simply set by the number of hole excitations of the thermal cloud, such that including up to one hole yields one splitting, two holes yields two splittings, and so on. Moreover, this effect is independent of the impurity mass. We thus expect that the exact ground-state quasiparticle will evolve into a single broad peak for temperatures $T>0$, with a broadening that scales as ${T}^{3/4}$ at low temperatures and sufficiently weak boson-boson interactions. In the zero-temperature limit, we show that our calculated ground-state polaron energy is in excellent agreement with recent quantum Monte Carlo results and with experiments.

In-medium bound states of two bosonic impurities in a one-dimensional Fermi gas

We investigate the ground-state energy of a one-dimensional Fermi gas with two bosonic impurities. We consider spinless fermions with no fermion-fermion interactions. The fermion-impurity and impurity-impurity interactions are modelled with Dirac delta functions. First, we study the case where impurity and fermions have equal masses, and the impurity-impurity two-body interaction is identical to the fermion-impurity interaction, such that the system is solvable with the Bethe ansatz. For attractive interactions, we find that the energy of the impurity-impurity subsystem is below the energy of the bound state that exists without the Fermi gas. We interpret this as a manifestation of attractive boson-boson interactions induced by the fermionic medium, and refer to the impurity-impurity subsystem as an in-medium bound state. For repulsive interactions, we find no in-medium bound states. Second, we construct an effective model to describe these interactions, and compare its predictions to the exact solution. We use this effective model to study non-integrable systems with unequal masses and/or potentials. We discuss parameter regimes for which impurity-impurity attraction induced by the Fermi gas can lead to the formation of in-medium bound states made of bosons that repel each other in the absence of the Fermi gas.

Observation of fermion-mediated interactions between bosonic atoms.

In high-energy and condensed-matter physics, particle exchange has an essential role in the understanding of long-range interactions and correlations. For example, the exchange of massive bosons leads to the Yukawa potential1,2, and phonon exchange between electrons gives rise to Cooper pairing in superconductors3. Here we show that, when a Bose-Einstein condensate of caesium atoms is embedded in a degenerate Fermi gas of lithium atoms, interspecies interactions can give rise to an effective trapping potential, damping, and attractive boson-boson interactions mediated by fermions. The latter, which is related to the Ruderman-Kittel-Kasuya-Yosida mechanism4, results from a coherent three-body scattering process. Such mediated interactions are expected to form new magnetic phases5 and supersolids6. We show that under suitable conditions, the mediated interactions can convert a stable Bose-Einstein condensate into a train of 'Bose-Fermi solitons'7,8. The predicted long-range nature of the mediated interactions opens up the possibility of correlating distant atoms and preparing new quantum phases.

Few-boson system with a single impurity: Universal bound states tied to Efimov trimers

Small weakly bound droplets determine a number of properties of ultracold Bose and Fermi gases. For example, Efimov trimers near the atom-atom-atom and atom-dimer thresholds lead to enhanced losses from bosonic clouds. Generalizations to four- and higher-body systems have also been considered. Moreover, Efimov trimers have been predicted to play a role in the Bose polaron with large boson-impurity scattering length. Motivated by these considerations, the present work provides a detailed theoretical analysis of weakly bound $N$-body clusters consisting of $N\ensuremath{-}1$ identical bosons (denoted by ``B'') of mass $m$ that interact with a single distinguishable impurity particle (denoted by ``X'') of mass $M$. The system properties are analyzed as a function of the mass ratio $\ensuremath{\kappa}$ (values from $\ensuremath{\kappa}=1$ to 50 are considered), where $\ensuremath{\kappa}$ is equal to $m/M$, and the two-body $s$-wave scattering length ${a}_{\text{BX}}$ between the bosons and the impurity. To reach the universal Efimov regime in which the size of the BBX trimer as well as those of larger clusters is much larger than the length scales of the underlying interaction model, three different approaches are considered: resonance states are determined in the absence of BB and BBX interactions, bound states are determined in the presence of repulsive three-body boson-boson-impurity interactions, and bound states are determined in the presence of repulsive two-body boson-boson interactions. The universal regime, in which the details of the underlying interaction model become irrelevant, is identified.

Induced p-Wave Pairing in Bose-Fermi Mixtures.

Cooper pairing caused by an induced interaction represents a paradigm in our description of fermionic superfluidity. Here, we present a strong coupling theory for the critical temperature of p-wave pairing between spin polarized fermions immersed in a Bose-Einstein condensate. The fermions interact via the exchange of phonons in the condensate, and our self-consistent theory takes into account the full frequency and momentum dependence of the resulting induced interaction. We demonstrate that both retardation and self-energy effects are important for obtaining a reliable value of the critical temperature. Focusing on experimentally relevant systems, we perform a systematic analysis varying the boson-boson and boson-fermion interaction strength as well as their masses, and identify the most suitable system for realizing a p-wave superfluid. Our results show that such a superfluid indeed is experimentally within reach using light bosons mixed with heavy fermions.

Dynamics of the one-dimensional Anderson insulator coupled to various bosonic baths

We study a particle which propagates in a one dimensional strong random potential and is coupled to a bosonic bath. We independently test various properties of bosons (hopping term, hard-core effects and generic boson-boson interaction) and show that bosonic itineracy is the essential ingredient governing the dynamics of the particle. Coupling of the particle to itinerant phonons or hard core bosons alike leads to delocalization of the particle by virtue of a subdiffusive (or diffusive) spread from the initially localized state. Delocalization remains in effect even when the boson frequency and the bandwidth of itinerant bosons remain an order of magnitude smaller than the magnitude of the random potential. When the particle is coupled to localized bosons, its spread remains logarithmic or even sub-logarithmic. The latter result together with the survival probability shows that the particle remains localized despite being coupled to bosons.

Superfluid drag in the two-component Bose-Hubbard model

In multicomponent superfluids and superconductors, co- and counter-flows of components have in general different properties. It was discussed in 1975 by Andreev and Bashkin, in the context of He$^3$/He$^4$ superfluid mixtures, that inter-particle interactions produce a dissipationless drag. The drag can be understood as a superflow of one component induced by phase gradients of the other component. Importantly the drag can be both positive (entrainment) and negative (counter-flow). The effect is known to be of crucial importance for many properties of diverse physical systems ranging from the dynamics of neutron stars, rotational responses of Bose mixtures of ultra-cold atoms to magnetic responses of multicomponent superconductors. Although there exists a substantial literature that includes the drag interaction phenomenologically, much fewer regimes are covered by quantitative studies of the microscopic origin of the drag and its dependence on microscopic parameters. Here we study the microscopic origin and strength of the drag interaction in a quantum system of two-component bosons on a lattice with short-range interaction. By performing quantum Monte-Carlo simulations of a two-component Bose-Hubbard model we obtain dependencies of the drag strength on the boson-boson interactions and properties of the optical lattice. Of particular interest are the strongly-correlated regimes where the ratio of co-flow and counter-flow superfluid stiffnesses can diverge, corresponding to the case of saturated drag.

Analytical approach to the Bose-polaron problem in one dimension

We discuss the ground state properties of a one-dimensional bosonic system doped with an impurity (the so-called Bose polaron problem). We introduce a formalism that allows us to calculate analytically the thermodynamic zero-temperature properties of this system with weak and moderate boson-boson interaction strengths for any boson-impurity interaction. Our approach is validated by comparing to exact quantum Monte Carlo calculations. In addition, we test the method in finite size systems using numerical results based upon the similarity renormalization group. We argue that the introduced approach provides a simple analytical tool for studies of strongly interacting impurity problems in one dimension.

Enhancing the Efimov correlation in Bose polarons with large mass imbalance

We study the effect of Efimov physics (in the few-body sector) to the spectral response of Bose polaron, a many-body system consisting of an impurity immersed in a bath of bosonic atoms. We find that the Efimov correlation can be greatly enhanced by increasing the mass ratio between the bosons and the impurity, which results in visible signatures in the rf spectrum of the polaron. Using a diagrammatic approach up to the third-order virial expansion, we show how the mass imbalance and the enhanced three-body effect modify the line shape and the width of the polaron spectrum. Moreover, we study the effect of a finite boson-boson interaction to the spectrum. Taking the realistic system of Li impurities immersed in Cs bosons with a positive Cs-Cs scattering length, we find a visible Efimov branch, which is associated with the second lowest Efimov trimer, in the polaron spectrum. In particular, by adjusting the boson density the Efimov branch can greatly hybridize with the attractive polaron branch leading to the spectrum broadening near their avoided level crossing. Our results can be directly probed in the cold atoms experiments of Li-Cs and Li-Rb Bose polarons.

Spin-chain model for strongly interacting one-dimensional Bose-Fermi mixtures

Strongly interacting one-dimensional (1D) Bose--Fermi mixtures form a tunable $XXZ$ spin chain. Within the spin-chain model developed here, all properties of these systems can be calculated from states representing the ordering of the bosons and fermions within the atom chain and from the ground-state wave function of spinless noninteracting fermions. We validate the model by means of an exact diagonalization of the full few-body Hamiltonian in the strongly interacting regime. Using the model, we explore the phase diagram of the atom chain as a function of the boson-boson (BB) and boson-fermion (BF) interaction strengths and calculate the densities, momentum distributions, and trap-level occupancies for up to 17 particles. In particular, we find antiferromagnetic (AFM) and ferromagnetic (FM) order and a demixing of the bosons and fermions in certain interaction regimes. We find, however, no demixing for equally strong BB and BF interactions, in agreement with earlier calculations that combined the Bethe ansatz with a local-density approximation.

Signatures of the single-particle mobility edge in the ground-state properties of Tonks-Girardeau and noninteracting Fermi gases in a bichromatic potential

We explore the ground state properties of cold atomic gases, loaded into a bichromatic lattice, focusing on the cases of non-interacting fermions and hard-core (Tonks-Girardeau) bosons, trapped by the combination of two potentials with incommensurate periods. For such systems, two limiting cases have been thoroughly established. In the tight-binding limit, the single-particle states in the lowest occupied band show a localization transition, as the strength of the second potential is increased above a certain threshold. In the continuous limit, when the tight-binding approximation does not hold anymore, a mobility edge is found, whose position in energy depends upon the strength of the second potential. Here, we study how the crossover from the discrete to the continuum behavior occurs, and prove that signatures of the localization transition and mobility edge clearly appear in the generic many-body properties of the systems. Specifically, we evaluate the momentum distribution, which is a routinely measured quantity in experiments with cold atoms, and demonstrate that, even in the presence of strong boson-boson interactions, the single particle mobility edge can be observed in the ground state properties.

Quasiparticle decay in a one-dimensional Bose-Fermi mixture

In a one-dimensional weakly interacting Bose-Fermi mixture one branch of elementary excitations is well described by the Bogoliubov spectrum. Here we use the microscopic theory to study the decay of such quasiparticle excitations. The main scattering process which leads to their decay is the backscattering of a Bogoliubov quasiparticle off the Fermi sea, where a particle-hole pair is excited. For a low-momentum quasiparticle (phonon) of momentum $q$, we find that the decay rate scales as $q^3$ provided $q$ is smaller than the Fermi momentum $k_F$, while in the opposite case the decay behaves as $q^2$. If the ratio of the masses of fermions and bosons equals to the ratio of the boson-fermion and the boson-boson interaction strengths, the decay rate changes dramatically. It scales as $q^7$ for $q<k_F$ while we find $q^6$ scaling at $q>k_F$. For a high momentum Bogoliubov quasiparticle, we find a constant decay rate for $q<k_F$, while it scales as $1/q$ for $q>k_F$. We also find an analytic expression for the decay rate in the crossover region between low and high momenta. The decay rate is a continuous, but nonanalytic function of the momentum at $q=k_F$. In the special case when the parameters of our system correspond to the integrable model, we observe that the decay rate vanishes.