The Bose polaron as thermometer of a trapped Bose gas: a quantum Monte Carlo study
Quantum impurities interacting with quantum environments offer unique insights into many-body systems. Here, we explore the thermometric potential of a neutral impurity immersed in a harmonically trapped bosonic quantum gas below the Bose-Einstein condensation critical temperature $T_c$. Using ab-initio Path Integral Monte Carlo simulations at finite temperatures, we analyze the impurity's sensitivity to temperature changes by exploiting experimentally accessible observables such as its spatial distribution. Our results, covering a temperature range of $-1.1 \leqslant T/T_c \leqslant 0.9$, reveal that the impurity outperforms estimations based on a one-species bath at lower temperatures, achieving relative precision of 3-4\% for 1000 measurement repetitions. While non-zero boson-impurity interaction strength $g_{BI}$ slightly reduces the accuracy, the impurity's performance remains robust, especially in the low-temperature regime $T/T_c \lesssim 0.45$ withing the analyzed interaction strengths $0 \leqslant g_{BI}/g \leqslant 5$, where $g$ is the boson-boson coupling. We confirm that quantum optical models can capture rather well the dependence of the temperature sensor on the impurity-gas interaction. Although our findings are in qualitative agreement with previous studies, our Monte Carlo simulations offer improved precision. We find that the maximum likelihood estimation protocol approaches the precision comparable to the limit set by the Quantum Fisher Information bound. Finally, using the Hellinger distance method, we directly extract the Fisher information and find that, by exploiting the extremum order statistics, impurities far from the trap center are more sensitive to thermal effects than those close to the trap center.