Synthetic superfluid chemistry with vortex-trapped quantum impurities

Abstract

We explore the effect of using two-dimensional matter-wave vortices to confine an ensemble of bosonic quantum impurities. This is modeled theoretically using a mass-imbalanced homogeneous two-component Gross-Pitaevskii equation where each component has independent atom numbers and equal atomic masses. By changing the mass imbalance of our system we find that the shape of the vortices is deformed even at modest imbalances, leading to barrel-shaped vortices, which we quantify using a multicomponent variational approach. The energy of impurity carrying vortex pairs is computed, revealing a mass-dependent energy splitting. We then compute the excited states of the impurity, which we in turn use to construct “covalent bonds” for vortex pairs. Our work opens a route to simulating synthetic chemical reactions with superfluid systems.