Structure and Dynamics of Bose Polarons across the Mott-Insulator to Superfluid Transition

Abstract

A mobile impurity particle immersed in a quantum degenerate gas leads to the formation of a quasiparticle, which can serve as a sensor for its environment. Here, we develop a unified wave function description of an impurity in a two-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model across the Mott-insulator to superfluid transition. Using a multi-mode variational ansatz based on the quantum Gutzwiller approach, we show that the impurity can form several kinds of polaronic and molecular states. In addition to their spectral properties, the wave function provides direct access to the microscopic structure of these states, and we demonstrate that strong correlations in the critical regime of the quantum phase transition give rise to several non-analytic features in the polaron properties. Increasing the impurity-boson interaction leads to transitions between polaron and molecular ground states, and the number of bosons in the impurity dressing cloud grows rapidly at the quantum critical point as the bath modes soften. We furthermore reveal qualitatively distinct non-equilibrium many-body dynamics after the injection of the impurity in the different phases of the Bose-Hubbard model. Our spectral, real space, and dynamical predictions describe complementary properties of polarons in a strongly correlated bosonic bath, which can be observed using current techniques with atoms in optical lattices.