Pump-probe spectroscopy of Bose polarons: Dynamical formation and coherence

Abstract

We propose and investigate a pump-probe spectroscopy scheme to unveil the time-resolved dynamics of fermionic or bosonic impurities immersed in a harmonically trapped Bose-Einstein condensate. In this scheme a pump pulse initially transfers the impurities from a noninteracting to a resonantly interacting spin state and, after a finite time in which the system evolves freely, the probe pulse reverses this transition. This directly allows us to monitor the nonequilibrium dynamics of the impurities as the dynamical formation of coherent attractive or repulsive Bose polarons and signatures of their induced interactions are imprinted in the probe spectra. We show that for interspecies repulsions exceeding the intraspecies ones a temporal orthogonality catastrophe occurs, followed by enhanced energy redistribution processes, independently of the impurity's flavor. This phenomenon takes place over the characteristic trap timescales. For much longer timescales a steady state is reached characterized by substantial losses of coherence of the impurities. This steady state is related to eigenstate thermalization and it is demonstrated to be independent of the system's characteristics.