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Abstract

Recently, two independent experiments reported the observation of long-lived polarons in a Bose-Einstein condensate, providing an excellent setting to study the generic scenario of a mobile impurity interacting with a quantum reservoir. Here we expand the experimental analysis by disentangling the effects of trap inhomogeneities and the many-body continuum in one of these experiments. This makes it possible to extract the energy of the polaron at a well-defined density as a function of the interaction strength. Comparisons with quantum Monte Carlo as well as diagrammatic calculations show good agreement, and provide a more detailed picture of the polaron properties at stronger interactions than previously possible. Moreover, we develop a semiclassical theory for the motional dynamics and three-body loss of the polarons, which partly explains a previously unresolved discrepancy between theory and experimental observations for repulsive interactions. Finally, we utilize quantum Monte Carlo calculations to demonstrate that the findings reported in the two experiments are consistent with each other.