Amado and Greenwood have shown that there is no Efimov effect for four or more particles. The present authors use an (n-1)-fold successive separable approximation (nssa) to the general n-body operator identities. They find that for the conditions considered the necessary condition for the existence of an infinite number of n-body bound levels (n > or = 4) is not violated. The nssa reduces the n-body to an effective two-body phase space. It is concluded that the appearance of the Efimov effect is not restricted to three-body systems. (RWR)
In the free three-dimensional space, we consider a pair of identical $\ensuremath{\uparrow}$ fermions of some species or in some internal state and a pair of identical $\ensuremath{\downarrow}$ fermions of another species or in another state. There is a resonant
s-wave interaction (that is, of zero range and infinite scattering length) between fermions in different pairs and no interaction within the same pair. We study whether this
2+2 fermionic system can exhibit (as the
3+1 fermionic system) a four-body Efimov effect in the absence of three-body Efimov effect, that is, the mass ratio $\ensuremath{\alpha}$ between $\ensuremath{\uparrow}$ and $\ensuremath{\downarrow}$ fermions and its inverse are both smaller than 13.6069\dots{}. For this purpose, we investigate scale invariant zero-energy solutions of the four-body Schr\"odinger equation, that is, positively homogeneous functions of the coordinates of degree $s\ensuremath{-}7/2$, where
s is a generalized Efimov exponent that becomes purely imaginary in the presence of a four-body Efimov effect. Using rotational invariance in momentum space, it is found that the allowed values of
s are such that
M(s) has a zero eigenvalue; here the operator
M(s), that depends on the total angular momentum $\ensuremath{\ell}$, acts on functions of two real variables (the cosine of the angle between two wave vectors and the logarithm of the ratio of their moduli), and we write it explicitly in terms of an integral matrix kernel. We have performed a spectral analysis of
M(s), analytical and for an arbitrary imaginary
s for the continuous spectrum and numerical and limited to
s=0 and $\ensuremath{\ell}\ensuremath{\le}12$ for the discrete spectrum. We conclude that no eigenvalue of
M(0) crosses zero over the mass ratio interval $\ensuremath{\alpha}\ensuremath{\in}[1;13.6069\ensuremath{\cdots}]$, even if, in the parity sector ${(\ensuremath{-}1)}^{\ensuremath{\ell}}$, the continuous spectrum of
M(s) has everywhere a zero lower border. As a consequence, there is no possibility of a four-body Efimov effect for the
2+2 fermions. We also enunciated a conjecture for the fourth virial coefficient of the unitary spin-
1/2 Fermi gas, inspired from the known analytical form of the third cluster coefficient and involving the integral over the imaginary
s axis of
s times the logarithmic derivative of the determinant of
M(s) summed over all angular momenta. The conjectured value is in contradiction with the experimental results.
We consider the system of three nonrelativistic spinless fermions in two dimensions, which interact through spherically-symmetric pair interactions. Recently, a claim has been made by Nishida et al for the existence of the so-called super Efimov effect by Nishida et al (2013 Phys. Rev. Lett. 110 235301 ). Namely, if the interactions in the system are fine-tuned to a p-wave resonance, an infinite number of bound states appears, whose negative energies are scaled according to the double exponential law. We present the mathematical proof that such a system indeed has an infinite number of bound levels. We also prove that , where N ( E ) is the number of bound states with the energy less than . The value of this limit is exactly equal to the value derived in Nishida et al using the renormalization group approach. Our proof resolves a recent controversy about the validity of results in Nishida et al (2013 Phys. Rev. Lett. 110 235301 ).
By studying the eigenvalue spectrum of the Faddeev kernel in a certain singular limit, we give an independent proof of an effect recently deduced by Efimov: When three identical particles interact via short-range pairwise potentials, the number of three-body bound states grows without limit when the pairwise scattering length
a becomes large. [The number of bound states is then roughly $(\frac{1}{\ensuremath{\pi}})\mathrm{ln}(\ensuremath{\Lambda}|a|)$, where $\ensuremath{\Lambda}$ is a momentum cutoff]. We extend our proof to the case where only two particles are identical and show that Efimov's effect persists in the special limiting cases with two heavy and one light particle, and with two light and one heavy particle.