Fluctuation-induced potential for an impurity in a semi-infinite one-dimensional Bose gas

Abstract: We consider an impurity in a semi-infinite one-dimensional system of weakly-interacting bosons. We calculate the interaction potential for the impurity due to the end of the system, i.e., the wall. For local repulsive (attractive) interaction between the impurity and the Bose gas, the interaction potential is attractive (repulsive). At short distances from the wall it decays exponentially crossing over into a universal $1/r^2$ behavior at separations $r$ above the healing length. Our results can also be interpreted as a Casimir-like interaction between two impurities, where one of them is infinitely strongly coupled to the Bose gas. We discuss various scenarios for the induced interaction between the impurities using the scattering approach. We finally address the phenomenon of localization of the impurity near the wall. In the paper we mainly study the case of a static impurity, however the universal $1/r^2$ interaction also holds for a slowly moving impurity.