Dressed magnon dynamics in a Bose-Hubbard bath: retardation, pairing, entanglement and two-magnon scattering

Abstract

We study one- and two-magnon dynamics in a spin-$1/2$ XX chain coupled to a tunable Bose-Hubbard bath. The XX Hamiltonian transports the magnons, while the bath dresses their motion and mediates an effective attraction. A single magnon forms a mobile polaron whose retarded bosonic cloud reduces its velocity below the static Lang-Firsov prediction and generates magnon-boson entanglement. In the weak-dressing, off-resonant mobile regime, the residual velocity deficit and entanglement are governed by the excitation weight of the cloud, as captured by perturbation theory and tensor network-based real-time simulations. Transport therefore provides a model-calibrated proxy for entanglement without joint-state reconstruction. When two clouds overlap, the bath mediates a finite-range attraction, yielding finite-size evidence for a compact two-magnon bound state and a transient post-scattering signature. On-site bath interactions suppress local boson number fluctuations and stiffen the bath response, reducing entanglement and weakening ground-state binding. Bath deformability thus emerges as a common control parameter for magnon transport, entanglement, and bath-mediated pairing.