Effective potential and polaronic mass shift in a trapped dynamical impurity-Luttinger liquid system

Recent experiments with cold atoms on the impurity motion in one-dimensional liquids of interacting bosons have revealed an interesting interplay between the polaronic impurity mass shift and the renormalization of the optical potential. We show that the influence of the external trap on the Bose gas leads to a steeper effective potential for the impurity. We propose a framework in which this potential renormalization and the mass shift can be quantitatively understood by combining a semi-classical theory of density wave excitations in the Luttinger liquid with the non-equilibrium formalism of a quantum Brownian particle. The obtained theoretical results reproduce well recent experimental data. Copyright (C) EPLA, 2013