We use the functional renormalization group to study the spectrum of three- and four-body states in bosonic systems around the unitary limit. Our effective action includes all energy-independent contact interactions in the four-atom sector, and we introduce a running trimer field to eliminate couplings that involve the atom-atom-dimer channel. The results show behavior qualitatively similar to those from exact approaches. The truncated action we use leads to overbinding of the two four-body states seen in those treatments. It also generates a third state, although only for a very narrow range of two-body scattering lengths.
The three- and four-boson systems with a large scattering length and a short effective range in the two-body sector are studied in the framework of Short-Range Effective Field Theory (SREFT). The starting point (leading order) of the EFT is taken to be the universal unitarity limit, where the two-body sector is parameter-free and only one three-body parameter enters. In this limit, physical systems manifest discrete scale invariance. Deviations from universality arising from finite scattering-length and effective-range corrections, as well as a four-body force required by renormalization, are included perturbatively at next-to-leading order. The three-body ground state and its associated four-body ground and first-excited states are studied using the Faddeev-Yakubovsky (FY) formalism and a complementary diagrammatic approach. By employing techniques to remove contributions from deep trimers in tetramer calculations, we extend our analysis to larger cutoffs than previously accessible within the FY approach to SREFT. Our results for binding energies and radii of
4He three- and four-atom systems converge well to results obtained with sophisticated phenomenological potentials. These successes suggest that the physics of
4He atomic clusters is governed by only small deviations from discrete scale invariance.
We perform a renormalization-group analysis of the nonrelativistic four-boson problem by means of a simple model with pointlike three- and four-body interactions. We investigate in particular the region where the scattering length is infinite and all energies are close to the atom threshold. We find that the four-body problem behaves truly universally, independent of any four-body parameter. Our findings confirm the recent conjectures of others that the four-body problem is universal, now also from a renormalization-group perspective. We calculate the corresponding relations between the four- and three-body bound states, as well as the full bound-state spectrum and comment on the influence of effective range corrections.
We apply the functional renormalization group to few-nucleon systems. Our starting point is a local effective action that includes three- and four-nucleon interactions, expressed in terms of nucleon and two-nucleon boson fields. The evolution of the coupling constants in this action is described by a renormalization group flow. We derive these flow equations both in the limit of exact Wigner SU(4) symmetry and in the realistic case of broken symmetry. In the symmetric limit we find that the renormalization flow equations decouple and can be combined into two sets, one of which matches the known results for bosons, and the other result matches the one for a single flavor of spin
1/2 fermions. The equations show universal features in the unitary limit, which is obtained when the two-body scattering length tends to infinity. We calculate the spin-quartet neutron-deuteron scattering length and the deuteron-deuteron scattering lengths in the spin-singlet and spin-quintet channels.
The Efimov effect arises in three-body systems near the unitary limit. Some of its features are universal, while others are not. This article uses a Functional-Renormalization- Group approach to discuss the Efimov effect and four-body systems. In this context, the Efimov effect appears as a consequence of the Renormalization-Group flow of couplings. On the four- body system, we find three tetramers below each Efimov trimer, and no evidence of four- body universality breaking. Two of these tetramers are in agreement with quantum-mechanical calculations and experimental results.
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.