Pattern formation of correlated impurities subjected to an impurity-medium interaction pulse

Abstract

We study the correlated dynamics of few interacting bosonic impurities immersed in a one-dimensional harmonically trapped bosonic environment. The mixture is exposed to a time-dependent impurity-medium interaction pulse moving it across the relevant phase-separation boundary. For modulation frequencies smaller than the trapping one, the system successively transits through the miscible and immiscible phases according to the driving of the impurity-medium interactions. For strong modulations, and driving from the miscible to the immiscible regime, a significant fraction of the impurities is expelled to the edges of the bath. They exhibit a strong localization behavior and tend to equilibrate. Following the reverse driving protocol, the impurities perform a breathing motion while featuring a two-body clustering and the bath is split into two incoherent parts. Interestingly, in both driving scenarios, dark-bright solitons are nucleated in the absence of correlations. A localization of the impurities around the trap center for weak impurity-impurity repulsions is revealed, which subsequently disperse into the bath for increasing interactions.