English

Mobile impurity coupled to correlated lattice bosons

Quantum Gases 2026-02-09 v2

Abstract

We investigate how the coherence and spatial dressing of a single impurity evolve in the two-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model when the impurity couples attractively to the bath. Using large-scale, sign-problem-free worm-algorithm quantum Monte Carlo, we measure the impurity winding, bath superfluid response and compressibility, and impurity-bath density correlations. In a compressible superfluid bath (Ub/t=13.3U_{\mathrm{b}}/t=13.3), strengthening attraction drives an interaction-controlled \emph{winding-collapse self-trapping crossover}: a mobile light polaron evolves continuously into a heavy polaron and ultimately into a bound cluster with vanishing winding, while the bath remains globally superfluid. In incompressible Mott-insulating baths, by contrast, extended density rearrangements are suppressed and the dressing cloud collapses; we compare the resulting short-range deformation patterns for both attractive and repulsive couplings. Across the SF-MI transition at fixed moderate attraction (Uib/t=8.0U_{\mathrm{ib}}/t=-8.0), the impurity crosses over from a mobile polaron with an extended deformation cloud to a nearly free defect with minimal dressing in the Mott background; for this coupling it does not lock into a fully self-trapped defect even deep in the insulator. Together with our companion Letter [Impurity Self-Trapping in Lattice Bose systems] on repulsive couplings, these results provide a unified microscopic picture of impurity self-trapping in correlated lattice bosons, connecting interaction-driven winding collapse in the superfluid to compressibility-controlled undressing across the SF-MI transition.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.11062,
  title  = {Mobile impurity coupled to correlated lattice bosons},
  author = {Chao Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.11062},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:07:10.506Z