Path-integral treatment of charged Bose polarons

Abstract

The system of a charged impurity in an interacting Bose gas has gained significant attention due to the long-range ion-atom interactions and the study of transport properties. Here, the ground state energy of a charged Bose polaron is calculated within the Bogoliubov approximation for both the Fr\"ohlich and beyond-Fr\"ohlich Hamiltonians using a generalized Feynman variational path-integral approach, which obtained accurate results for other polaron problems. The generalized approach, which was used to improve the energy result for the neutral polaron, has resulted in a minor improvement, indicating that Feynman's approach is sufficient when the impurity-boson interaction is long-range. Beyond-Fr\"ohlich corrections results in the emergence of a divergence in the polaronic energy indicating a transition between the repulsive and attractive polaron regime. The path-integral approach with the beyond-Fr\"ohlich Hamiltonian is also compared to a field-theory calculation from Christensen et al, 2021. The validity of the Bogoliubov approximation is investigated. The optical absorption has also been calculated within the Bogoliubov approximation for weak ion-atom interactions, and the effect of finite temperature has been studied. We show that the coupling of the ion to an oscillating external electric field offers a straigtforward experimental probe for the charged polaron in a Bose gas, different from but complementary to existing spectroscopic techniques.