Impurities in a one-dimensional Bose gas: the flow equation approach

Abstract

A few years ago, flow equations were introduced as a technique for calculating the ground-state energies of cold Bose gases with and without impurities[1,2]. In this paper, we extend this approach to compute observables other than the energy. As an example, we calculate the densities, and phase fluctuations of one-dimensional Bose gases with one and two impurities. For a single mobile impurity, we use flow equations to validate the mean-field results obtained upon the Lee-Low-Pines transformation. We show that the mean-field approximation is accurate for all values of the boson-impurity interaction strength as long as the phase coherence length is much larger than the healing length of the condensate. For two static impurities, we calculate impurity-impurity interactions induced by the Bose gas. We find that leading order perturbation theory fails when boson-impurity interactions are stronger than boson-boson interactions. The mean-field approximation reproduces the flow equation results for all values of the boson-impurity interaction strength as long as boson-boson interactions are weak.