Renormalization group approach to the Fröhlich polaron model: application to impurity-BEC problem

Sci Rep. 2015 Jul 17:5:12124. doi: 10.1038/srep12124.

Abstract

When a mobile impurity interacts with a many-body system, such as a phonon bath, a polaron is formed. Despite the importance of the polaron problem for a wide range of physical systems, a unified theoretical description valid for arbitrary coupling strengths is still lacking. Here we develop a renormalization group approach for analyzing a paradigmatic model of polarons, the so-called Fröhlich model, and apply it to a problem of impurity atoms immersed in a Bose-Einstein condensate of ultra cold atoms. Polaron energies obtained by our method are in excellent agreement with recent diagrammatic Monte Carlo calculations for a wide range of interaction strengths. They are found to be logarithmically divergent with the ultra-violet cut-off, but physically meaningful regularized polaron energies are also presented. Moreover, we calculate the effective mass of polarons and find a smooth crossover from weak to strong coupling regimes. Possible experimental tests of our results in current experiments with ultra cold atoms are discussed.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.