Quantum Carousel: The Fate of a Bound State Attached to a Linear Rotor

We study the angulon problem -- a linear rotor in a bosonic bath -- in the regime where attractive impurity-boson interactions can support a shallow bound state. To study the fate of the angulon in the vicinity of bound-state formation, we formulate a beyond-linear-coupling model. First, we consider attractive, spherically symmetric impurity-boson interactions for which the linear rotor can be mapped onto a static impurity. The well-known polaron formalism provides an adequate description in this limit. For anisotropic potentials, the presence of a shallow bound state with pronounced anisotropic character leads to a many-body instability that washes out the angulon dynamics.