Rotation of quantum impurities in the presence of a many-body environment

Pioneered by the seminal works of Wigner and Racah, the quantum theory of angular momentum evolved into a powerful machinery, commonly used to classify the states of isolated quantum systems and perturbations to their structure due to electromagnetic or crystalline fields. In ``realistic'' experiments, however, quantum systems are almost inevitably coupled to a many-particle environment and a field of elementary excitations associated with it, which is capable of fundamentally altering the physics of the system. We present the first systematic treatment of quantum rotation coupled to a many-particle environment. By using a series of canonical transformations on a generic microscopic Hamiltonian, we single out the conserved quantities of the problem. Using a variational ansatz accounting for an infinite number of many-body excitations, we characterize the spectrum of angular momentum eigenstates and identify the regions of instability, accompanied by emission of angular Cerenkov radiation. The developed technique can be applied to a wide range of systems described by the angular momentum algebra, from Rydberg atoms immersed into BEC's, to cold molecules solvated in helium droplets, to ultracold molecular ions.