«Physical Review Letters Editor’s Suggestion»
We investigate the problem of an infinitely heavy impurity interacting with a dilute
Bose gas at zero temperature. When the impurity-boson interactions are short-ranged,
we show that boson-boson interactions induce a quantum blockade effect, where a single
boson can effectively block or screen the impurity potential. Since this behavior
depends on the quantum granular nature of the Bose gas, it cannot be captured within
a standard classical-field description. Using a combination of exact quantum Monte
Carlo methods and a truncated basis approach, we show how the quantum correlations
between bosons lead to universal few-body bound states and a logarithmically slow
dependence of the polaron ground-state energy on the boson-boson scattering length.
Moreover, we expose the link between the polaron energy and the spatial structure of
the quantum correlations, spanning the infrared to ultraviolet physics.