Seminarium Optyczne

The dynamics of a charged impurity immersed in a quantum medium can be quite complex due to the long-range nature of the interactions. The ion can excite the gas during its motion, changing momentum in a nonlinear way. I will describe the simplest theoretical approaches to this problem based on the transformation to the co-moving frame. Dressing the impurity with the host atoms can result in formation of a polaronic state characterized by effective mass, which may be detectable in state-of-the art experiments. I will also report on recent experimental efforts aiming to understand three-body recombination involving an ion, which is competing with many-body effects.