Novel polaron state for single impurity in a bosonic Mott insulator

¹ Theoretical Division, Center for Nonlinear Studies, Los Alamos National Laboratory - Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA
² Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, Oak Ridge National Laboratory - Oak Ridge, TN 37831, USA
³ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Wyoming - Laramie, WY 82071, USA

Received: 6 March 2012
Accepted: 26 April 2012

Abstract

We show that a single impurity embedded in a cold-atom bosonic Mott insulator leads to a novel polaron that exhibits correlated motion with an effective mass and a linear size that nearly diverge at a critical value of the on-site impurity-boson interaction strength. Cold-atom technology can tune the polaron's properties and break up the composite particle into a deconfined impurity-hole and boson particle state at finite, controllable polaron momentum.