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arXiv:1106.3853 · Physical Review A

Spectra of helium clusters with up to six atoms using soft-core potentials

M. Gattobigio, Alejandro Kievsky, M. Viviani

Published Nov 4, 2011• 61 citations
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Abstract

In this paper, we investigate small clusters of helium atoms using the hyperspherical harmonic basis. We consider systems with $A=2,3,4,5,6$ atoms with an interparticle potential which does not present a strong repulsion at short distances. We use an attractive Gaussian potential that reproduces the values of the dimer binding energy, the atom-atom scattering length, and the effective range obtained with one of the widely used He-He interactions, the Aziz and Slaman potential, called LM2M2. In systems with more than two atoms, we consider a repulsive three-body force that, by construction, reproduces the trimer binding energy of the LM2M2 potential. With this model, consisting of the sum of a two- and three-body potential, we have calculated the spectrum of clusters formed by four, five, and six helium atoms. We have found that these systems present two bound states, one deep and one shallow, close to the threshold fixed by the energy of the $(A\ensuremath{-}1)$-atom system. Universal relations between the energies of the excited state of the $A$-atom system and the ground-state energy of the $(A\ensuremath{-}1)$-atom system are extracted, as well as the ratio between the ground state of the $A$-atom system and the ground-state energy of the trimer.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.84.052503

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In this paper, we investigate small clusters of helium atoms using the hyperspherical harmonic basis. We consider systems with A=2,3,4,5,6A=2,3,4,5,6A=2,3,4,5,6 atoms with an interparticle potential which does not present a strong repulsion at short distances. We use an attractive Gaussian potential that reproduces the values of the dimer binding energy, the atom-atom scattering length, and the effective range obtained with one of the widely used He-He interactions, the Aziz and Slaman potential, called LM2M2. In systems with more than two atoms, we consider a repulsive three-body force that, by construction, reproduces the trimer binding energy of the LM2M2 potential. With this model, consisting of the sum of a two- and three-body potential, we have calculated the spectrum of clusters formed by four, five, and six helium atoms. We have found that these systems present two bound states, one deep and one shallow, close to the threshold fixed by the energy of the (A\ensuremath−1)(A\ensuremath{-}1)(A\ensuremath−1)-atom system. Universal relations between the energies of the excited state of the AAA-atom system and the ground-state energy of the (A\ensuremath−1)(A\ensuremath{-}1)(A\ensuremath−1)-atom system are extracted, as well as the ratio between the ground state of the AAA-atom system and the ground-state energy of the trimer.
In this work we investigate small clusters of bosons using the hyperspherical harmonic basis. We consider systems with A=2,3,4,5,6A=2,3,4,5,6A=2,3,4,5,6 particles interacting through a soft interparticle potential. In order to make contact with a real system, we use an attractive Gaussian potential that reproduces the values of the dimer binding energy and the atom-atom scattering length obtained with one of the most widely used 4{}^{4}4He-4{}^{4}4He interactions, the LM2M2 potential of Aziz and Slaman. The intensity of the potential is varied in order to explore the clusters' spectra in different regions with large positive and large negative values of the two-body scattering length. In addition, we include a repulsive three-body force to reproduce the trimer binding energy. With this model, consisting in the sum of a two- and three-body potential, we have calculated the spectrum of the four-, five-, and six-particle systems. In all the regions explored, we have found that these systems present two states, one deep and one shallow close to the $A\ensuremath{-}1$ threshold. Some universal relations between the energy levels are extracted; in particular, we have estimated the universal ratios between thresholds of the three-, four-, and five-particle continua using the two-body Gaussian potential. They agree with recent measurements and theoretical predictions.
In this work we investigate the structure and dynamics of small clusters of Helium atoms. We consider bound states of clusters having A = 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 atoms and continuum states in the three-atom system. Motivated by the fact that the He-He system has a very large scattering length a compared to the range r 0 of the He-He potential (r 0/a < 1/10), we propose the use of a soft-core interparticle potential. We use an attractive gaussian potential that reproduces the values of the dimer binding energy and the atomatom scattering length obtained with one of the widely used He-He interactions, the LM2M2 potential. In addition, we include a repulsive three-body force to reproduce the trimer binding energy. With this model, consisting in the sum of a two- and a three-body potential, we show the spectrum of the four, five, and sixparticle systems and phase-shifts and inelasticities in the three-atom system. Comparisons to calculations using realistic He-He potentials are given. In addition some universal relations are explored.
Abstract To describe long-range behaviour of one particle removed from a few- or a many-body system, a hyperspherical cluster model has been developed. It has been applied to the ground and first excited states of helium drops with five, six, eight and ten atoms interacting via a two-body soft gaussian potential. Convergence of the hyperspherical cluster harmonics expansion is studied for binding energies, root-mean-squared radii and overlaps of the wave functions of two helium drops differing by one atom. It was shown that with increasing model space the functional form of such overlaps at large distances converges to the correct asymptotic behaviour. The asymptotic normalization coefficients that quantify the overlaps’ amplitudes in this region are calculated. It was also shown that in the first excited state one helium atom stays far apart from the rest forming a two-body molecule, or a halo. The probability of finding the halo atom in the classically-forbidden region of space depends on the definition of the latter and on the valence atom binding energy. The total norm of the overlap integrals, the spectroscopic factor, represents the number of partitions of a many-body state into a chosen state of the system with one particle removed. The spectroscopic factors have been calculated and their sum rules are discussed giving a further insight into the structure of helium drops.
Small Clusters of 4^44He Atoms in Finite-Cutoff Effective Field Theory
Small clusters of 4^44He atoms are benchmark systems for universal few-body physics near the unitary limit. We study these systems using a finite-cutoff effective field theory calibrated to low-energy observables from the realistic LM2M2 potential. The chosen two-body cutoff reproduces both the atom--atom scattering length and effective range, while a regulated three-body interaction is adjusted to the trimer and tetramer ground-state energies. We distinguish total binding energies from the one-atom separation energies SA∗=BA∗−BA−1S_A^*=B_A^*-B_{A-1}SA∗​=BA∗​−BA−1​ of the shallow excited states. Ground-state energies through A=8A=8A=8 are reproduced at the few-percent level, but threshold-sensitive observables are less accurate. In particular, the calculated tetramer separation energy is S4∗=2.85S_4^*=2.85S4∗​=2.85~mK, compared with 0.920.920.92--0.960.960.96~mK in converged LM2M2 calculations, and the atom--trimer scattering length differs substantially from modern LM2M2 benchmarks. For A≥5A\ge5A≥5, the available excited-state benchmarks are sparse and strongly method dependent. Comparison with another soft-core interaction suggests that the discrepancies primarily reflect short-distance physics and higher-order operators omitted from the finite-cutoff Hamiltonian rather than numerical convergence of the stochastic variational calculation. Finite-cutoff EFT therefore provides an efficient description of ground-state systematics, whereas shallow excited states and atom--cluster scattering require a controlled higher-order and cutoff-dependence analysis.
A formal proof is given that for NNN-boson systems in which two-body interaction potentials are described by a single Gaussian the ratio of higher-order to the lowest-order hyper-radial potentials decreases at $N\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ensuremath{\infty}$ as ${N}^{\ensuremath{-}1/2}$ or faster. As a result, for such potentials, the convergence of binding energies for ground and several lowest excited states, obtained in expansion of the NNN-body wave function over the hyperspherical-harmonics basis, improves with increasing number of bosons. For a phenomenological three-body repulsive potential, introduced to account for the missing hard core, the ratio of higher-order to lowest-order hyper-radial potential, corresponding to this three-body potential, also decreases as ${N}^{\ensuremath{-}1/2}$ or faster when $N\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ensuremath{\infty}$. Although adding the three-body contributions leads to increased influence from the total nondiagonal couplings around the node of the lowest hyper-radial potential, the arguments are given that this should not dramatically deteriorate the convergence if the range of repulsion is properly chosen. This means that the hyperspherical-harmonics expansion with soft two-body and repulsive three-body effective forces may become an attractive tool for studying the spectra of many-body systems. It is suggested that fine tuning of the three-body repulsion to reproduce the binding energies over a large region of NNN is possible. In particular, it has been shown that an NNN-independent choice for the three-body repulsion exists for which the ground-state binding energies of $N\ensuremath{\le}112$ atoms of helium, obtained in the lowest-order approximation of the hyperspherical-harmonics expansion, are close to the prediction of the Green's function Monte Carlo method with a hard-core He-He potential.
Saturation properties are directly linked to the short-range scale of the two-body interaction of the particles. The case of helium is special; on one hand, the two-body potential has a strong repulsion at short distances. On the other hand, the extremely weak binding of the helium dimer locates this system very close to the unitary limit allowing for a description based on an effective theory. At leading order of this theory a two- and a three-body term appear, each one characterized by a low-energy constant. In a potential model this description corresponds to a soft potential model with a two-body term purely attractive plus a three-body term purely repulsive constructed to describe the dimer and trimer binding energies. Here we analyze the capability of this model to describe the saturation properties making a direct link between the low-energy scale and the short-range correlations. We will show that the energy per particle, EN/N{E}_{N}/NEN​/N, can be obtained with reasonable accuracy at leading order extending the validity of this approximation, characterizing universal behavior in few-boson systems close to the unitary limit, to the many-body system.