Due to atomic interactions and dispersion in the total atom number, the order parameter of a pair-condensed Fermi gas experiences a collapse in a time that we derive microscopically. As in the bosonic case, this blurring time depends on the derivative of the gas chemical potential with respect to the atom number and on the variance of that atom number. The result is obtained first using linearized time-dependent Bogoliubov--de Gennes equations, then in the random-phase approximation, and then it is generalized to beyond the mean field. In this framework, we construct and compare two phase operators for the paired fermionic field: The first one, issuing from our study of the dynamics, is the infinitesimal generator of adiabatic translations in the total number of pairs. The second one is the phase operator of the amplitude of the field of pairs on the condensate mode. We explain that these two operators differ due to the dependence of the condensate wave function on the atom number.
Due to atomic interactions and dispersion in the total atom number, the order parameter of a pair-condensed Fermi gas experiences a collapse in a time that we derive microscopically. As in the bosonic case, this blurring time depends on the derivative of the gas chemical potential with respect to the atom number and on the variance of that atom number. The result is obtained first using linearized time-dependent Bogoliubov--de Gennes equations, then in the random-phase approximation, and then it is generalized to beyond the mean field. In this framework, we construct and compare two phase operators for the paired fermionic field: The first one, issuing from our study of the dynamics, is the infinitesimal generator of adiabatic translations in the total number of pairs. The second one is the phase operator of the amplitude of the field of pairs on the condensate mode. We explain that these two operators differ due to the dependence of the condensate wave function on the atom number.
A condensate of pairs in an isolated, homogeneous, unpolarised, finite-size spin 1/2 Fermi gas at low nonzero temperature T, undergoes with time a phase change with a random component, due to coupling to the gas thermal phonons. With the quantum second Josephson relation relating the derivative of the condensate phase operator to the phonon occupation numbers, and linearised kinetic equations giving the evolution of occupation number fluctuations, we access the behaviour of the phase change variance at times much longer than the phonon collision time. The case of a convex phonon branch is similar to the Bose gas case: the leading collisional processes are the Beliaev-Landau 3-phonons processes, and the variance is the sum of a ballistic term and of a delayed diffusive term, whose analytical expressions are given in the thermodynamic limit. The concave case is more exotic. It is analysed at time scales T−9, allowing one to restrict to 2 phonons → 2 phonons small-angle Landau-Khalatnikov processes. The total number of phonons is conserved and the phonon mean occupation numbers at equilibrium can exhibit a negative chemical potential, assumed isotropic. The phase change variance is then the sum of a ballistic term, of a diffusive term, of exotic subsubleading terms and of a constant term. The analytic expression of some of the corresponding coefficients is obtained, as well as the diverging leading behavior of the other ones when the phonon chemical potential tends to 0. When this chemical potential is 0, the variance sub-ballistic part becomes superdiffusive, with an exponent 5/3 and an exactly-known coefficient. For a nonzero infinitesimal phonon chemical potential, a law is found, interpolating between superdiffusive and diffusive phase spreading. Also new results are obtained on the phonon Landau-Khalatnikov damping rate, in particular at negative phonon chemical potential.
It is generally assumed that a condensate of paired fermions at equilibrium is characterized by a macroscopic wavefunction with a well-defined, immutable phase. In reality, all systems have a finite size and are prepared at non-zero temperature; the condensate has then a finite coherence time, even when the system is isolated. This fundamental effect, crucial for applications using macroscopic coherence, was scarcely studied. Here, we link the coherence time to the condensate phase dynamics, and show using a microscopic theory that the time derivative of the condensate phase operator θ^0 is proportional to a chemical potential operator which includes both the fermionic pair-breaking and the bosonic pair-motion excitation branches. For a given realization of the number of particle N and of the energy E, the phase evolves at long times as −2μmc(E,N)t/ℏ where μmc(E,N) is the microcanonical chemical potential; fluctuations of N and E from one realization to the other then lead to a ballistic spreading of the phase and to a Gaussian decay of the temporal coherence function with a characteristic time ∝N1/2.On the contrary, in the absence of energy and number fluctuations, the decay of the temporal coherence function is exponential with a characteristic time scaling as N due to the diffusive motion of θ^0 in the environnement created by the excited modes. We give an explict expression of this characteristic time at low temperature in the case where the bosonic branch is convex and the phonons undergo 2↔1 Beliaev-Landau process. Finally, we propose methods to measure each contribution to the coherence time using ultracold atoms.
The impact of interparticle correlations on the behavior of Bose-Einstein Condensates (BECs) is discussed using two approaches. In the first approach, the wavefunction of a BEC is encoded in the N-particle sector of an extended "catalytic state". Going to a time-dependent interaction picture, we can organize the effective Hamiltonian by powers of N−1/2. Requiring the terms of order N1/2 to vanish, we get the Gross-Pitaevskii Equation. Going to the next order, N0, we obtain the number-conserving Bogoliubov approximation. Our approach allows one to stay in the Schrödinger picture and to apply many techniques from quantum optics. Moreover, it is easier to track different orders in the Hamiltonian and to generalize to the multi-component case. In the second approach, I consider a state of N=l×n bosons that is derived by symmetrizing the n-fold tensor product of an arbitrary l-boson state. Particularly, we are interested in the pure state case for l=2, which we call the Pair-Correlated State (PCS). I show that PCS reproduces the number-conserving Bogoliubov approximation; moreover, it also works in the strong interaction regime where the Bogoliubov approximation fails. For the two-site Bose-Hubbard model, I find numerically that the error (measured by the trace distance of the two-particle reduced density matrices) of PCS is less than two percent over the entire parameter space, thus making PCS a bridge between the superfluid and Mott insulating phases. Amazingly, the error of PCS does not increase, in the time-dependent case, as the system evolves for longer times. I derive both time-dependent and -independent equations for the ground state and the time evolution of the PCS ansatz. The time complexity of simulating PCS does not depend on N and is linear in the number of orbitals in use.
This thesis is about the derivation of effective mean field equations and their next-order corrections starting from nonrelativistic many-body quantum theory. Mean field equations provide an approximate ansatz for the description of interacting many-particle systems. In this ansatz the interaction between the particles is replaced by a self-consistent external potential leading to an effective one-body description of the many-particle system. Next-order corrections provide an approximation which goes one step further and tries to capture also subleading effects that are not resolved by the mean field ansatz. We present mathematical proofs for the validity of such effective theories for different models that are motivated, e.g., from the theory of ultracold atoms (the bosonic Hartree equation and the corresponding Bogoliubov theory) and from plasma physics (the motion of a tracer particle through a degenerate and dense electron gas). Starting from a many-body Schrödinger equation, our goal is to show that the solutions converge in a particular limit to the solutions to an effective mean field equation and its next-order corrections. After a short introduction and a summary in Chapter one, we present the main part of this work in three self-contained chapters. In Chapter two we analyze the dynamics of a large number N of nonrelativistic bosons in the weak coupling limit, i.e., for a coupling constant g_N=1/N. It is well known that in the limit of infinite particle number, the Hartree equation emerges as an effective one-particle theory of the Bose gas. This is closely related to the remarkable physical phenomenon of Bose-Einstein condensation at low temperature, namely that the majority of particles in a Bose gas occupies the same copy of a single one-particle quantum state. Our emphasis lies in the description of the few particles that fluctuate around the Bose-Einstein condensate. We show convergence of the fully interacting dynamics to an auxiliary time evolution in the norm of the N-particle space. This result allows us to prove several other assertions. Among other things, it is used to derive the Hartree equation with optimal speed of convergence 1/N for initial states that are close to ground states of interacting systems and also to prove convergence of the N-particle solution towards a time evolution obtained from the Bogoliubov Hamiltonian on Fock space. Chapter three is about the low energy properties of the weakly interacting homogeneous Bose gas. Here, we derive a novel estimate for low energy eigenfunctions stating that the probability for finding l particles out of their total number N not in the condensate is exponentially small in the number l. Using this bound, we then prove that the ground state wave function of the microscopic model satisfies certain quasifree type properties. The exponential decay is moreover used to provide an alternative proof for the validity of Bogoliubov's approximation for the low-lying energy eigenvalues. Bogoliubov theory states that the excitation energies of the Bose gas are given by excitations of free quasiparticles obeying an effective energy-momentum dispersion relation which is linear for small momentum. The linearity of the effective dispersion relation is an essential ingredient for the explanation of the superfluid character of the Bose gas. In Chapter four we study the time evolution of a single particle coupled through a pair potential to a dense and homogeneous ideal Fermi gas in two spatial dimensions. This type of model is well known in plasma physics where it is used to describe the energy loss of ions moving through a dense and degenerate electron gas. We analyze the model for a coupling parameter g=1 and prove closeness of the time evolution to an effective dynamics for large densities of the gas and for long time scales of the order of some power of the density. The effective dynamics is generated by the free Hamiltonian with a large but constant energy shift. To leading order, this energy shift is given by the spatially homogeneous mean field potential produced by the gas particles, whereas at next-to-leading order, one has to consider an additional correction to the mean field energy which is due to so-called recollision processes.
The Bogoliubov method for the excitation spectrum of a Bose-condensed gas is generalized to apply to a gas with an exact large number N of particles. This generalization yields a description of the Schr\"odinger picture field operators as the product of an annihilation operator A for the total number of particles and the sum of a ``condensate wave function'' $\ensuremath{\xi}(\mathbf{x})$ and a phonon field operator $\ensuremath{\chi}(\mathbf{x})$ in the form $\ensuremath{\psi}(\mathbf{x})\ensuremath{\approx}A{\ensuremath{\xi}(\mathbf{x})+\ensuremath{\chi}(\mathbf{x})/\sqrt{N}}$ when the field operator acts on the N particle subspace. It is then possible to expand the Hamiltonian in decreasing powers of N, and thus obtain solutions for eigenvalues and eigenstates as an asymptotic expansion of the same kind. It is also possible to compute all matrix elements of field operators between states of different N. The excitation spectrum can be obtained by essentially the same method as Bogoliubov only if $\ensuremath{\xi}(\mathbf{x})$ is a solution of the time-independent Gross-Pitaevskii equation for N particles and any chemical potential $\ensuremath{\mu}$, which yields a valid and stable solution of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. The treatment within a subspace of fixed N is identical in form to that usually used, but the interpretation of the operators is slightly different. A time-dependent generalization is then made, yielding an asymptotic expansion in decreasing powers of N for the equations of motion. In this expansion the condensate wave function has the time-dependent form $\ensuremath{\xi}(\mathbf{x},t)$, and the condition for the validity of the expansion is that $\ensuremath{\xi}(\mathbf{x},t)$ satisfies the time-dependent Gross-Pitaevskii equation $\ensuremath{\partial}\ensuremath{\xi}/\ensuremath{\partial}t=\ensuremath{-}({\ensuremath{\Elzxh}}^{2}/2m){\ensuremath{\nabla}}^{2}\ensuremath{\xi}+V\ensuremath{\xi}+Nu|\ensuremath{\xi}{|}^{2}\ensuremath{\xi}$. The physics is then described in a kind of interaction picture, called the condensate picture, in which the phonon operator can be expressed as $\ensuremath{\chi}(\mathbf{x},t)={\ensuremath{\sum}}_{k}{\ensuremath{\xi}}_{k}(\mathbf{x},t){\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{k},$ where the operators ${\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{k}$ are time-independent annihilation operators, and the state vector has a time evolution described by a Schr\"odinger equation in which the Hamiltonian is a time-dependent quadratic form in the phonon creation and annihilation operators, whose coefficients are explicitly determined in terms of the time-dependent condensate wave function $\ensuremath{\xi}(\mathbf{x},t)$.
We use mean-field theory to investigate the dynamics of superfluid fermions. This thesis includes our two works. The first one is to study Josephson oscillations and self-trapping of superfluid fermions in a double-well potential with time-dependent Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations. We investigate the behaviour of a two-component Fermi superfluid. We numerically solve the time-dependent Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations and characterize the regimes of Josephson oscillations and self-trapping for different potential barriers and initial conditions. In the weak link limit the results agree with a two-mode model where the relative population and the phase difference between the two wells obey coupled nonlinear Josephson equations. A more complex dynamics is predicted for large amplitude oscillations and large tunneling. The second one is to calculate the dynamic structure factor of unitary fermions. We have studied the dynamic structure factor of unitary fermions both at zero and finite temperature using the Bogoliubov-de Gennes theory and also Superfluid Local Density Approximation. We have derived the expression of the linear response function and the dynamic structure factor in the random phase approximation. At zero temperature, the SLDA+RPA formalism indeed provides a better accuracy at low momentum transfer and also its static structure factor is closer to quantum Monte Carlo value than that in BdG+RPA; however SLDA seems to give worse results for the molecular excitations at large momentum transfer. We have discussed the role of temperature and the comparison between SLDA and BdG, as well as with experimental data. The analysis is still at a preliminary level, but it suggests that mean-field theories can indeed be used to extract quantitative information about the order parameter and the excitations of the system by two-photon Bragg scattering experiments.