The Bose-Hubbard polaron from weak to strong coupling

Abstract

We investigate the zero-temperature properties of a mobile impurity immersed in a bath of bosonic particles confined to a square lattice. We analyze the regimes of attractive and repulsive coupling between the impurity and the bath particles for different strengths of boson-boson interactions in the bath, using exact large-scale quantum Monte-Carlo simulations in the grand canonical ensemble. For weak coupling, the polaron mass ratio is found to decrease around the Mott insulator (MI) to superfluid (SF) transition of the bath, as predicted by recent theory, confirming the possible use of the impurity as a probe for the transition. For strong coupling in the MI regime, instead, the impurity is found to modify the bath density by binding to an extra bath particle or a hole, depending on the sign of the polaron-bath interactions. While the binding prevent the aforementioned use of the polaron mass ratio as an MI-SF transition probe, we show that it can be used instead as a probe of the binding itself. Our exact numerical results provide a benchmark for comparing lattice Bose polaron theories and are relevant for experiments with cold atoms trapped in optical lattices, where the presence of a confining harmonic potential can be modeled by a slowly varying local chemical potential.