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arXiv:0706.4085 · Physical Review Letters

New Effective Interaction for the Trapped Fermi Gas

Y. Alhassid, G. F. Bertsch, L. Fang

Published Jun 10, 2008• 43 citations
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Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.100.230401

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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.
We extend a recently introduced separable interaction for the unitary trapped Fermi gas to all values of the scattering length. We derive closed expressions for the interaction matrix elements and the two-particle eigenvectors. At unitarity we analytically demonstrate the convergence of this interaction to the zero-range two-body pseudopotential for sss-wave scattering. We apply this effective interaction to the three- and four-particle systems along the BEC-BCS crossover and find that their low-lying energies exhibit convergence in the regularization parameter that is much faster than for the conventional renormalized contact interaction. We find similar convergence properties of the three-particle free energy at unitarity.
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.
The configuration interaction (CI) method for calculating the exact eigenstates of a quantum-mechanical few-body system is problematic when applied to contact interactions between the particles. In two and three dimensions, the approach fails due to the pathology of the Dirac delta-potential, making it impossible to reach convergence by gradually increasing the size of the Hilbert space. However, for practical applications this problem may be cured in a rather simple manner, by renormalizing the STRENGTH of the contact potential, which must be diagonalized in a TRUNCATED Hilbert space. The procedure relies on the comparison of CI energies and wave functions with those obtained by the exact solution of the two-body Schrodinger equation for the regularized contact interaction. The rather simple scheme, while keeping the numerical procedures still elementary, nevertheless provides both cut-off-independent few-body physical observables and an estimate of the error of the CI calculation.
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 present a coupled-pair approach for studying few-body physics in harmonically trapped ultracold gases. The method is applied to a two-component Fermi system of NNN particles. A stochastically variational Gaussian expansion method is applied, focusing on optimization of the two-body correlations present in the strongly interacting, or unitary, limit. The ground-state energy of the four-, six- and eight-body problem with equal spin populations is calculated with high accuracy and minimal computational effort. We also calculate the structural properties of these systems and discuss their implication for the many-body ultracold gas and other few-body calculations.
Density functionals for nuclei usually include an effective 3-body interaction that depends on a fractional power of the density. Using insights from the many-body theory of the low-density two-component Fermi gas, we consider a new, nonlocal, form for the energy functional that is consistent with the Fock-space representation of interaction operators. In particular, there is a unique spatially nonlocal generalization of the contact form of the interaction that preserves the ρ(7/3) density dependence required by the many-body theory. We calculate the ground-state energies for particles in a harmonic trap by using the nonlocal induced 3-body interaction and compare them to numerically accurate Green's function Monte Carlo calculations. Using no free parameters, we find that a nonlocality in the space domain provides a better description of the weak-coupling regime than the local-density approximation.