Unified theory of attractive and repulsive polarons in one-dimensional Bose gas
Nikolay Yegovtsev, T. Alper Yoğurt, Matthew T. Eiles, Victor Gurarie
Published: 2025/10/1
Abstract
We present a unified description of attractive and repulsive polarons, formed in a one-dimensional Bose gas hosting an impurity particle, by obtaining all ground and excited state solutions to the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. Modeling the impurity with an attractive square-well potential, we characterize the excited-state energy branches as a function of interaction strength. As the impurity-bath coupling increases, the excited states change from distinct soliton configurations to hybridized soliton-polaron states, eventually crossing over from repulsive to attractive polarons at unitarity. We identify a universal regime near this crossover where the polaron properties are accurately characterized by the zero-energy scattering length.