Suppression of polaron self-localization by correlations

Abstract

We investigate self-localization of a polaron in a homogeneous Bose-Einstein condensate in one dimension. This effect, where an impurity is trapped by the deformation that it causes in the surrounding Bose gas, has been first predicted by mean field calculations, but has not been seen in experiments. We study the system in one dimension, where, according to the mean field approximation, the self-localization effect is particularly robust, and present for arbitrarily weak impurity-boson interactions. We address the question whether self-localization is a real effect by developing a variational method which incorporates impurity-boson correlations non-perturbatively and solving the resulting inhomogeneous correlated polaron equations. We find that correlations inhibit self-localization except for very strongly repulsive or attractive impurity-boson interactions. Our prediction for the critical interaction strength for self-localization agrees with a sharp drop of the inverse effective mass to almost zero found in quantum Monte Carlo simulations of polarons in one dimension.