Quantum Impurities as Probes of Finite-Temperature Fluctuations in Two-Dimensional Bose Gases

Abstract

Two-dimensional quantum gases provide a distinctive setting in which enhanced thermal fluctuations, finite-size effects, and two-body bound-state formation are intrinsically intertwined. In this work, we study a single attractive impurity immersed in a finite, weakly interacting two-dimensional Bose gas, where finite size stabilizes a nonzero condensate fraction by introducing an infrared momentum scale, thereby enabling a Bogoliubov description of the bath. Using a hybrid approach that combines finite-temperature many-body scattering theory with input from path-integral Monte Carlo, we analyze the impurity quasiparticle energy across the condensate and normal regimes. The infrared scale generates a phonon-activation temperature below which the impurity energy remains nearly temperature independent. Once the resolved phonon modes become thermally populated, their contribution competes with condensate depletion, producing a nonmonotonic temperature dependence of the polaron energy. These results suggest that attractive Bose polarons may serve as sensitive probes of finite-size thermal fluctuations, phonon dressing, and bound-state physics in low-dimensional Bose gases.