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Mobile impurity interacting with a Hubbard chain and the role of Friedel oscillations

Felipe Isaule1, Abel Rojo-Francàs2,3,4, Duc Tuan Hoang2, Thomás Fogarty2, Thomas Busch2, and Bruno Juliá-Díaz3,4

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Phys. Rev. B 113, 224303 – Published 3 June, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/qdrb-44zn

Abstract

This work examines a mobile impurity interacting with a bath of a few spin-↑ and spin-↓ fermions in a small one-dimensional open lattice system. We study ground-state properties using the exact diagonalization method, where the system is modeled by a three-component Fermi Hubbard Hamiltonian. We find that in addition to the standard phase separation between a strongly repulsive impurity and the bath, a strongly attractive impurity also phase separates with the fermionic holes due to the particle-hole symmetry. Furthermore, we find that the impurity can show an oscillatory pattern in its density for intermediate attractive and repulsive bath-impurity interactions, which are induced by Friedel oscillations in the finite-size fermionic bath. This rich behavior of the impurity could be probed with fermionic ultracold mixtures in optical lattices.

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Phys. Rev. B 113, 224303– Published 3 June, 2026
  • Received 9 February 2026
  • Revised 8 May 2026
  • Accepted 13 May 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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