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arXiv:1408.7096 · Science Advances

Strong-coupling ansatz for the one-dimensional Fermi gas in a harmonic potential

Jesper Levinsen, Pietro Massignan, Georg M. Bruun, Meera M. Parish

Published Jul 3, 2015• 99 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

A major challenge in modern physics is to accurately describe strongly interacting quantum many-body systems. One-dimensional systems provide fundamental insights because they are often amenable to exact methods. However, no exact solution is known for the experimentally relevant case of external confinement. We propose a powerful ansatz for the one-dimensional Fermi gas in a harmonic potential near the limit of infinite short-range repulsion. For the case of a single impurity in a Fermi sea, we show that our ansatz is indistinguishable from numerically exact results in both the few- and many-body limits. We furthermore derive an effective Heisenberg spin-chain model corresponding to our ansatz, valid for any spin-mixture, within which we obtain the impurity eigenstates analytically. In particular, the classical Pascal's triangle emerges in the expression for the ground-state wave function. As well as providing an important benchmark for strongly correlated physics, our results are relevant for emerging quantum technologies, where a precise knowledge of one-dimensional quantum states is paramount.

DOI
10.1126/sciadv.1500197

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A major challenge in modern physics is to accurately describe strongly interacting quantum many-body systems. One-dimensional systems provide fundamental insights because they are often amenable to exact methods. However, no exact solution is known for the experimentally relevant case of external confinement. We propose a powerful ansatz for the one-dimensional Fermi gas in a harmonic potential near the limit of infinite short-range repulsion. For the case of a single impurity in a Fermi sea, we show that our ansatz is indistinguishable from numerically exact results in both the few- and many-body limits. We furthermore derive an effective Heisenberg spin-chain model corresponding to our ansatz, valid for any spin-mixture, within which we obtain the impurity eigenstates analytically. In particular, the classical Pascal's triangle emerges in the expression for the ground-state wave function. As well as providing an important benchmark for strongly correlated physics, our results are relevant for emerging quantum technologies, where a precise knowledge of one-dimensional quantum states is paramount.
We conduct a theoretical study of SU(N\mathrm{SU}(NSU(N) fermions confined by a one-dimensional harmonic potential. First, we introduce a numerical approach for solving the trapped interacting few-body problem, by which one may obtain accurate energy spectra across the full range of interaction strengths. In the strong-coupling limit, we map the SU(N\mathrm{SU}(NSU(N) Hamiltonian to a spin-chain model. We then show that an existing, extremely accurate ansatz---derived for a Heisenberg SU(2) spin chain---is extendable to these NNN-component systems. Lastly, we consider balanced SU(N\mathrm{SU}(NSU(N) Fermi gases that have an equal number of particles in each spin state for N=2,3,4N=2,\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}3,\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}4N=2,3,4. In the weak- and strong-coupling regimes, we find that the ground-state energies rapidly converge to their expected values in the thermodynamic limit with increasing atom number. This suggests that the many-body energetics of NNN-component fermions may be accurately inferred from the corresponding few-body systems of NNN distinguishable particles.
The transition from ``few to many'' has recently been probed experimentally in an ultracold harmonically confined one-dimensional lithium gas, in which a single impurity atom interacts with a background gas consisting of one, two, or more identical fermions [A. N. Wenz et al., Science 342, 457 (2013)]. For repulsive interactions between the background or majority atoms and the impurity, the interaction energy for relatively moderate system sizes was analyzed and found to converge toward the corresponding expression for an infinitely large Fermi gas. Motivated by these experimental results, we apply perturbative techniques to determine the interaction energy for weak and strong coupling strengths and derive approximate descriptions for the interaction energy for repulsive interactions with varying strength between the impurity and the majority atoms and any number of majority atoms.
Interacting one-dimensional quantum systems play a pivotal role in physics. Exact solutions can be obtained for the homogeneous case using the Bethe ansatz and bosonisation techniques. However, these approaches are not applicable when external confinement is present. Recent theoretical advances beyond the Bethe ansatz and bosonisation allow us to predict the behaviour of one-dimensional confined systems with strong short-range interactions, and new experiments with cold atomic Fermi gases have already confirmed these theories. Here we demonstrate that a simple linear combination of the strongly interacting solution with the well-known solution in the limit of vanishing interactions provides a simple and accurate description of the system for all values of the interaction strength. This indicates that one can indeed capture the physics of confined one-dimensional systems by knowledge of the limits using wave functions that are much easier to handle than the output of typical numerical approaches. We demonstrate our scheme for experimentally relevant systems with up to six particles. Moreover, we show that our method works also in the case of mixed systems of particles with different masses. This is an important feature because these systems are known to be non-integrable and thus not solvable by the Bethe ansatz technique.
Abstract We propose a very accurate and efficient variational scheme for the ground state of the system of p-wave attractively interacting fermions confined in a one-dimensional harmonic trap. By the construction, the method takes the non-analytical part of interactions exactly into account and thus it approximates the true ground-state wave function in a whole range of interactions very accurately. Within the method, we determine different properties of the system for a different number of particles and different interactions. In this way, we explore how the system and its features transit from the ideal non-interacting Fermi gas to the system of infinitely strong attractions. Additionally, we demonstrate that the ansatz may also be used on a repulsive branch of interactions where other numerical methods break down. The presented method of including zero-range interactions is very universal and may be easily generalized to other one-dimensional confinements.
We explore a few-fermion mixture consisting of two components that are repulsively interacting and confined in a one-dimensional harmonic trap. Different scenarios of population imbalance ranging from the completely imbalanced case where the physics of a single impurity in the Fermi sea is discussed to the partially imbalanced and equal population configurations are investigated. For the numerical calculations the multiconfigurational time-dependent Hartree method is employed, extending its application to few-fermion systems. Apart from numerical calculations we generalize our ansatz for a correlated pair wave function proposed recently [I. Brouzos and P. Schmelcher, Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 045301 (2012)] for bosons to mixtures of fermions. From weak to strong coupling between the components the energies, the densities and the correlation properties of one-dimensional systems change vastly with an upper limit set by fermionization where for infinite repulsion all fermions can be mapped to identical ones. The numerical and analytical treatments are in good agreement with respect to the description of this crossover. We show that for equal populations each pair of different component atoms splits into two single peaks in the density while for partial imbalance additional peaks and plateaus arise for very strong interaction strengths. The case of a single-impurity atom shows rich behavior of the energy and density as we approach fermionization and is directly connected to recent experiments [G. Z\"urn et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 075303 (2012)].
We provide an analytically tractable toy model of an infinitely heavy impurity interacting with the spin-polarized gas of bath fermions via a contact potential in 1D and placed in a harmonic trap. The solution to this problem requires knowledge of the single-particle fermionic eigenstates in the presence of a harmonic trap and a contact potential. We show how the spectrum can be understood from a perturbative solution of the exact transcendental equation in the weak and strong-coupling regimes. We additionally provide expressions for normalized wavefunctions and different overlaps between the states in the presence and absence of the impurity. Using these exact results, we analyze the energy of the polaron, derive Tan's contact-like relation for the density at the center of the harmonic trap, and compute the quasiparticle residue.