Physics (Internal)

Mobile impurities in quantum systems

This event is part of the Condensed Matter Theory Seminar Series.

Abstract: The question of a mobile impurity interacting with a bath, is a long standing problem of condensed matter physics. The question, which started with the celebrated Brownian motion, is now relatively well understood for classical particles. The situation is however much less clear when the bath and the particle are quantum objects, a situation relevant for a host of different microscopic realizations ranging from impurities in Helium to polarons in Fermi liquids. I will discuss here recent results we obtained for the case of one-dimensional quantum bath, for which novel regimes of motion of the impurity appear, such as sub-diffusive regimes, and for which the physics is still largely open. I will also present recent experiments in cold atomic systems probing these phenomena.