Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: We study a mobile impurity in a one-dimensional harmonically confined optical lattice interacting repulsively with a bosonic bath. The behavior of the impurity across baths with superfluid and Mott-insulator domains is examined, including its full back-action effect on the bath. We characterize the bath-impurity phase diagram and reveal the appearance of a correlated counterflow phase, which we support with an analytical model for a mobile impurity-hole pair. This phase shows an extended combined insulator domain of unity filling but no independent domain of constant density. The transition to this phase features a sudden orthogonality and the change of the shape of the impurity's profile to that of a free particle in an infinite square well. The findings of this work suggest the appearance of unconventional counterflow in trapped imbalanced atomic mixtures.
Source: Physical Review Letters
DOI: 10.1103/9ch1-dnvc
Language: English
Subfield: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funders: Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, Generalitat de Catalunya, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Instituto de Física de Cantabria, Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo, European Regional Development Fund, Agencia Estatal de Investigación, Institut de Ciències del Cosmos, Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico, Ministerio de Universidades
OpenAlex ID: W4411672998