Lattice Polarons across the Superfluid to Mott Insulator Transition

We study the physics of a mobile impurity confined in a two-dimensional lattice, moving within a Bose-Hubbard bath at zero temperature. Exploiting the quantum Gutzwiller formalism, we develop a beyond-Fröhlich model of the bath-impurity interaction to describe the properties of the polaronic quasiparticle formed by the dressing of the impurity by quantum fluctuations of the bath. We find a stable and well-defined polaron throughout the entire phase diagram of the bath, except for the very low tunneling limit of the hard-core superfluid. The polaron properties are highly sensitive to the different universality classes of the quantum phase transition between the superfluid and Mott insulating phases, providing an unambiguous probe of correlations and collective modes in a quantum critical many-body environment.