Coalescence of Two Impurities in a Trapped One-dimensional Bose Gas

We study the ground state of a one-dimensional (1D) trapped Bose gas with two mobile impurity particles. To investigate this setup, we develop a variational procedure in which the coordinates of the impurity particles are slowlike variables. We validate our method using the exact results obtained for small systems. Then, we discuss energies and pair densities for systems that contain of the order of 100 atoms. We show that bosonic noninteracting impurities cluster. To explain this clustering, we calculate and discuss induced impurity-impurity potentials in a harmonic trap. Further, we compute the force between static impurities in a ring (in the manner of the Casimir force), and contrast the two effective potentials: the one obtained from the mean-field approximation, and the one due to the one-phonon exchange. Our formalism and findings are important for understanding (beyond the polaron model) the physics of modern 1D cold-atom systems with more than one impurity.