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arXiv:0705.4335 · Physical Review A

Effective theory for trapped few-fermion systems

Ionel Stetcu, BRUCE R. BARRETT, U. van Kolck, James P. Vary

Published Dec 14, 2007• 83 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We apply the general principles of effective field theories to the construction of effective interactions suitable for few- and many-body calculations in a no-core shell model framework. We calculate the spectrum of systems with three and four two-component fermions in a harmonic trap. In the unitary limit, we find that three-particle results are within 10% of known semianalytical values even in small model spaces. The method is very general, and can be readily extended to other regimes, more particles, different species (e.g., protons and neutrons in nuclear physics), or more-component fermions (as well as bosons). As an illustration, we present calculations of the lowest-energy three-fermion states away from the unitary limit and find a possible inversion of parity in the ground state in the limit of trap size large compared to the scattering length. Furthermore, we investigate the lowest positive-parity states for four fermions, although we are limited by the dimensions we can currently handle in this case.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.76.063613

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We apply the general principles of effective field theories to the construction of effective interactions suitable for few- and many-body calculations in a no-core shell model framework. We calculate the spectrum of systems with three and four two-component fermions in a harmonic trap. In the unitary limit, we find that three-particle results are within 10% of known semianalytical values even in small model spaces. The method is very general, and can be readily extended to other regimes, more particles, different species (e.g., protons and neutrons in nuclear physics), or more-component fermions (as well as bosons). As an illustration, we present calculations of the lowest-energy three-fermion states away from the unitary limit and find a possible inversion of parity in the ground state in the limit of trap size large compared to the scattering length. Furthermore, we investigate the lowest positive-parity states for four fermions, although we are limited by the dimensions we can currently handle in this case.
We study systems of few two-component fermions interacting via short-range interactions within a harmonic-oscillator trap. The dominant interactions, which are two-body interactions, are organized according to the number of derivatives and defined in a two-body truncated model space made from a bound-state basis. Leading-order (LO) interactions are solved for exactly using the formalism of the no-core shell model, whereas corrections are treated as many-body perturbations. We show explicitly that next-to-LO and next-to-next-to-LO interactions improve convergence as the model space increases. We present results at unitarity for three- and four-fermion systems, which show excellent agreement with the exact solution (for the three-body problem) and results obtained by other methods (in the four-body case). We also present results for finite scattering lengths and nonzero range of the interaction, including (at positive scattering length) observation of a change in the structure of the three-body ground state and extraction of the atom-dimer scattering length.
We consider the general two, three, and four neutron systems in a harmonic oscillator (HO) trap. By constructing a model for the 2, 3, and 4-neutron interactions, we make predictions about the theoretical conditions that produce a 2, 3, and 4 body bound state. We do so using an Effective Field Theory (EFT) in a No Core Shell Model (NCSM) basis space. The HO dependence is added to discretize the problem into a finite number of energy eigenstates in which the NCSM basis states are written. We find that as the width parameter (b) of the well tends to infinity, a bound 2-body state reproduces a bound 3 and 4-body state, that 2- body bound states do not reproduce 3 and 4 body bound states in the regime of 0.6760 < b/a < 1.7467, and we also show below scattering lengths of a = 4.438 X 10-15 m, 1.700 X 10- 15 m, and 1.866 X 10-15 m the 2, 3, and 4 body states are bound, respectively, for a width parameter of 3 Fermi’s.
Abstract We revisit the properties of the two-component Fermi gas with short-range interactions in three dimensions, in the limit where the s -wave scattering length diverges. Such a unitary Fermi gas possesses universal thermodynamic and dynamical observables that are independent of any interaction length scale. Focusing on trapped systems of N fermions, where N ≤ 10 , we investigate how well we can determine the zero-temperature behavior of the many-body system from published few-body data on the ground-state energy and the contact. For the unpolarized case, we find that the Bertsch parameters extracted from trapped few-body systems all lie within 15% of the established value. Furthermore, the few-body values for the contact are well within the range of values determined in the literature for the many-body system. In the limit of large spin polarization, we obtain a similar accuracy for the polaron energy, and we estimate the polaron’s effective mass from the dependence of its energy on N . We also compute an upper bound for the squared wave-function overlap between the unitary Fermi system and the non-interacting ground state, both for the trapped and uniform cases. This allows us to prove that the trapped unpolarized ground state at unitarity has zero overlap with its non-interacting counterpart in the many-body limit N → ∞ .
We consider interacting Fermi systems close to the unitary regime and compute the corrections to the energy density that are due to a large scattering length and a small effective range. Our approach exploits the universality of the density functional and determines the corrections from the analyical results for the harmonically trapped two-body system. The corrections due to the finite scattering length compare well with the result of Monte Carlo simulations. We also apply our results to symmetric neutron matter.
We apply the configuration-interaction method to calculate the spectra of two-component Fermi systems in a harmonic trap, studying the convergence of energies at the unitary interaction limit. We find that for a fixed regularization of the two-body interaction the convergence is exponential or better in the truncation parameter of the many-body space. However, the conventional regularization is found to have poor convergence in the regularization parameter, with an error that scales as a low negative power of this parameter. We propose a new regularization of the two-body interaction that produces exponential convergence for systems of three and four particles. We estimate the ground-state energy of the four-particle system to be (5.045 +/- 0.003) variant Planck's constant over 2 pi omega.