The challenge of understanding the dynamics of a mobile impurity in an interacting quantum many-body medium comes from the necessity of including entanglement between the impurity and excited states of the environment in a wide range of energy scales. In this Letter, we investigate the motion of a finite mass impurity injected into a three-dimensional quantum Bose fluid as it starts shedding Bogoliubov excitations. We uncover a transition in the dynamics as the impurity's velocity crosses a critical value that depends on the strength of the interaction between the impurity and bosons as well as the impurity's recoil energy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe examine stationary-state properties of an impurity particle injected into a one-dimensional quantum gas. We show that the value of the impurity's end velocity lies between zero and the speed of sound in the gas and is determined by the injection protocol. This way, the impurity's constant motion is a dynamically emergent phenomenon whose description goes beyond accounting for the kinematic constraints of the Landau approach to superfluidity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe interplay of strong quantum correlations and far-from-equilibrium conditions can give rise to striking dynamical phenomena. We experimentally investigated the quantum motion of an impurity atom immersed in a strongly interacting one-dimensional Bose liquid and subject to an external force. We found that the momentum distribution of the impurity exhibits characteristic Bragg reflections at the edge of an emergent Brillouin zone.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe investigate the motion of an impurity particle injected with finite velocity into an interacting one-dimensional quantum gas. Using large-scale numerical simulations based on matrix product states, we observe and quantitatively analyze long-lived oscillations of the impurity momentum around a nonzero saturation value, called quantum flutter. We show that the quantum flutter frequency is equal to the energy difference between two branches of collective excitations of the model.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe investigate the dynamics of the one-dimensional strongly repulsive spin-1/2 Bose-Hubbard model for filling nu