Quantum Dynamics of Ultracold Bose Polarons.

We analyze the dynamics of Bose polarons in the vicinity of a Feshbach resonance between the impurity and host atoms. We compute the radio-frequency absorption spectra for the case when the initial state of the impurity is noninteracting and the final state is strongly interacting with the host atoms. We compare results of different theoretical approaches including a single excitation expansion, a self-consistent T-matrix method, and a time-dependent coherent state approach. Our analysis reveals sharp spectral features arising from metastable states with several Bogoliubov excitations bound to the impurity atom. This surprising result of the interplay of many-body and few-body Efimov type bound state physics can only be obtained by going beyond the commonly used Fröhlich model and including quasiparticle scattering processes. Close to the resonance we find that strong fluctuations lead to a broad, incoherent absorption spectrum where no quasiparticle peak can be assigned.

Quantum statistical ensemble for emissive correlated systems.

Relaxation dynamics of complex quantum systems with strong interactions towards the steady state is a fundamental problem in statistical mechanics. The steady state of subsystems weakly interacting with their environment is described by the canonical ensemble which assumes the probability distribution for energy to be of the Boltzmann form. The emergence of this probability distribution is ensured by the detailed balance of the transitions induced by the interaction with the environment. Here we consider relaxation of an open correlated quantum system brought into contact with a reservoir in the vacuum state. We refer to such a system as emissive since particles irreversibly evaporate into the vacuum. The steady state of the system is a statistical mixture of the stable eigenstates. We found that, despite the absence of the detailed balance, the stationary probability distribution over these eigenstates is of the Boltzmann form in each N-particle sector. A quantum statistical ensemble corresponding to the steady state is characterized by different temperatures in the different sectors, in contrast to the Gibbs ensemble. We investigate the transition rates between the eigenstates to understand the emergence of the Boltzmann distribution and find their exponential dependence on the transition energy. We argue that this property of transition rates is generic for a wide class of emissive quantum many-body systems.

Modeling the metastable dynamics of correlated structures.

Metastable quantum dynamics of an asymmetric triangular cluster that is coupled to a reservoir is investigated. The dynamics is governed by bath-mediated transitions, which in part require a thermal activation process. The decay rate is controlled by tuning the excitation spectrum of the frustrated cluster. We use the master equation approach and construct transition operators in terms of many-body states. We analyze dynamics of observables and reveal metastability of an excited state and of a magnetically polarized ground state.

Quantum quenches and work distributions in ultralow-density systems.

We present results on quantum quenches in lattice systems with a fixed number of particles in a much larger number of sites. Both local and global quenches in this limit generically have power-law work distributions ("edge singularities"). We show that this regime allows for large edge singularity exponents beyond that allowed by the constraints of the usual thermodynamic limit. This large-exponent singularity has observable consequences in the time evolution, leading to a distinct intermediate power-law regime in time. We demonstrate these results first using local quantum quenches in a low-density Kondo-like system, and additionally through global and local quenches in Bose-Hubbard, Aubry-Andre, and hard-core boson systems at low densities.

Rotation of a single acetylene molecule on Cu(001) by tunneling electrons in STM.

We study the elementary processes behind one of the pioneering works on scanning tunneling microscope controlled reactions of single molecules [Stipe et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 81, 1263 (1998)]. Using the Keldysh-Green function approach for the vibrational generation rate in combination with density functional theory calculations to obtain realistic parameters we reproduce the experimental rotation rate of an acetylene molecule on a Cu(100) surface as a function of bias voltage and tunneling current. This combined approach allows us to identify the reaction coordinate mode of the acetylene rotation and its anharmonic coupling with the C-H stretch mode. We show that three different elementary processes, the excitation of C-H stretch, the overtone ladder climbing of the hindered rotational mode, and the combination band excitation together explain the rotation of the acetylene molecule on Cu(100).