Four-boson Efimov physics is well known in the negative energy regime but far less above the four-body breakup threshold. The part of this region with negative two-boson scattering length is studied solving rigorous four-particle scattering equations for transition operators in the momentum space. Moving away from the unitary limit, the Efimov tetramers evolve from unstable bound states into resonances. Their energies and widths are studied as functions of the two-boson scattering length; a universal behavior is established and given in a dimensionless representation. The Efimov tetramers have finite width in the whole regime; they broaden rapidly in the resonance regime but remain narrower than the associated trimer. The resonant behavior is most clearly seen in the four-particle recombination rate.
We calculated, using seven realistic $^{4}\mathrm{He}\text{\ensuremath{-}}^{4}\mathrm{He}$ potentials in the literature, the Efimov spectra of the
4He trimer and tetramer and analyzed the universality of the systems. The three-(four-)body Schr\"odinger equations were solved fully nonadiabatically with the high-precision calculation method employed in our previous work on the
4He trimer and tetramer [Phys. Rev. A 85, 022502 (2012); Phys. Rev. A 85, 062505 (2012)]. We found the following universality in the four-boson system: (i) The critical scattering lengths at which the tetramer ground and excited states couple to the four-body threshold are independent of the choice of the two-body realistic potentials in spite of the difference in the short-range details and do not contradict the corresponding values observed in the experiments in ultracold alkali-metal atoms when scaled with the van der Waals length
rvdW, and (ii) the four-body hyperradial potential has a repulsive barrier at the four-body hyperradius ${R}_{4}\ensuremath{\approx}3\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}{r}_{\mathrm{vdW}}$, which prevents the four particles from getting close together to explore nonuniversal features of the interactions at short distances. This result is an extension of the universality in Efimov trimers that the appearance of the repulsive barrier at the three-body hyperradius ${R}_{3}\ensuremath{\approx}2\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}{r}_{\mathrm{vdW}}$ makes the critical scattering lengths independent of the short-range details of the interactions as reported in the literature and also in the present work for the
4He trimer with the realistic potentials.
The momentum-space structure of the Faddeev-Yakubovsky (FY) components of weakly bound tetramers is investigated at the unitary limit using a renormalized zero-range two-body interaction. The results, obtained by considering a given trimer level with binding energy
B3, provide further support to a universal scaling function relating the binding energies of two successive tetramer states. The correlated scaling between the tetramer energies comes from the sensitivity of the four-boson system to a short-range four-body scale. Each excited
Nth tetramer energy
B4(N) moves as the short-range four-body scale changes, while the trimer properties are kept fixed, with the next excited tetramer
B4(N+1) emerging from the atom-trimer threshold for a universal ratio ${B}_{4}^{(N)}/{B}_{3}={B}_{4}^{(N)}/{B}_{4}^{(N+1)}\ensuremath{\simeq}4.6$, which does not depend on
N. We show that both channels of the FY decomposition [atom-trimer (
K type) and dimer-dimer (
H type)] present high-momentum tails that reflect the short-range four-body scale. We also found that the
H channel is favored over the
K channel at low momentum, when the four-body momentum scale largely overcomes the three-body scale.
We use exact four-boson scattering equations in the momentum-space framework to study the universal properties of shallow Efimov tetramers and their dependence on the two-boson scattering length. We demonstrate that, in contrast to previous predictions, the shallow tetramer in a particular experimentally unexplored regime is not an unstable bound state but an inelastic virtual state. This leads to a resonant behaviour of the atom-trimer scattering length and thereby to a resonant enhancement of the trimer relaxation in ultracold atom-trimer mixtures.