Many-body collisional dynamics of impurities injected into a double-well trapped Bose-Einstein condensate

We unravel the many-body dynamics of a harmonically trapped impurity colliding with a bosonic medium confined in a double well upon quenching the initially displaced harmonic trap to the center of the double well. We reveal that the emerging correlation dynamics crucially depends on the impurity-medium interaction strength allowing for a classification into different dynamical response regimes. For strong attractive impurity-medium couplings the impurity is bound to the bosonic bath, while for intermediate attractions it undergoes an effective tunneling. In the case of weak attractive or repulsive couplings the impurity penetrates the bosonic bath and performs a dissipative oscillatory motion. Further increasing the impurity-bath repulsion results in the pinning of the impurity between the density peaks of the bosonic medium, a phenomenon that is associated with a strong impurity-medium entanglement. For strong repulsions, the impurity is totally reflected by the bosonic medium. To unravel the underlying microscopic excitation processes accompanying the dynamics, we employ an effective potential picture. We extend our results to the case of two bosonic impurities and demonstrate the existence of a qualitatively similar impurity dynamics.

Automated summary

This study investigates the many-body dynamics of a harmonically trapped impurity colliding with a bosonic medium, revealing different behaviors of the impurity depending on the strength of the interaction. Strong attractions lead to binding, intermediate attractions result in effective tunneling, weak attractions or repulsions lead to penetrating and dissipative motion, and strong repulsions cause total reflection by the medium.