Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Log inSign up
Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Blog
Job Board
Q3AS

© 2026 Aqora Quantum S.A.S.

TermsPrivacyLegal Notice

arXiv:1506.06751 · Physical Review A

Efimov correlations in strongly interacting Bose gases

Marcus Barth, Johannes Hofmann

Published Dec 30, 2015• 32 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We compute the virial coefficients, the contact parameters, and the momentum distribution of a strongly interacting three-dimensional Bose gas by means of a virial expansion up to third order in the fugacity, which takes into account three-body correlations exactly. Our results characterize the nondegenerate regime of the interacting Bose gas, where the thermal wavelength is smaller than the interparticle spacing but the scattering length may be arbitrarily large. We observe a rapid variation of the third virial coefficient as the scattering length is tuned across the three-atom and the atom-dimer thresholds. The momentum distribution at unitarity displays a universal high-momentum tail with a log-periodic momentum dependence, which is a direct signature of Efimov physics. We provide a quantitative description of the momentum distribution at high momentum as measured by P. Makotyn et al. [Nat. Phys. 10, 116 (2014)], and our calculations indicate that the lowest trimer state might not be occupied in the experiment. Our results allow for a spectroscopy of Efimov states in the unitary limit.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.92.062716

Related papers

Two-Body and Three-Body Contacts for Identical Bosons near Unitarity

Dane Hudson Smith, Eric Braaten, Daekyoung Kang +1 more

In a recent experiment with ultracold trapped Rb85 atoms, Makotyn et al. studied a quantum-degenerate Bose gas in the unitary limit where its scattering length is infinitely large. We show that the observed momentum distributions are compatible with a universal relation that expresses the high-momentum tail in terms of the two-body contact C2 and the three-body contact C3. We determine the contact densities for the unitary Bose gas with number density n to be C2 ≈ 20 n(4/3) and C3 ≈ 2n(5/3). We also show that the observed atom loss rate is compatible with that from 3-atom inelastic collisions, which gives a contribution proportional to C3, but the loss rate is not compatible with that from 2-atom inelastic collisions, which gives a contribution proportional to C2. We point out that the contacts C2 and C3 could be measured independently by using the virial theorem near and at unitarity, respectively.

arXiv:1309.6922•Physical Review Letters•Mar 17, 2014•74 citations

Few-Body Physics in Quantum Gases

K. Helfrich

Few-body effects play an important role for the understanding of ultracold quantum gases. We make use of an effective field theory approach to investigate various aspects of universal few-body physics close to a Feshbach resonance. That is the regime where the scattering length is large compared to all other length scales of the system and thus determines the observables. It is also the regime where the Efimov effect whose main characteristic is the occurrence of a sequence of three-body bound states becomes important. At unitarity, i.e., for diverging scattering length, the ratio of binding energies of neighboring states approaches a constant. The existence of those trimers can be captured by a single three-body parameter and influences observables such as recombination rates. Starting from adequate Lagrangians, we derive atom-dimer scattering amplitudes that contain all information of interest about the three-particle systems. With this method, we first investigate the scattering of atoms and dimers at finite temperature in the presence of the Efimov effect. We calculate the dimer relaxation rate and obtain good agreement with available experimental data. Furthermore, heteronuclear mixtures exhibiting large interspecies scattering length are studied in detail. If bosons are the majority species, the Efimov effect occurs in an S-wave channel and we are able to compute three-body recombination and dimer relaxation rates. The results are compared to the outcome of two existing experiments. For mainly fermionic systems, the Efimov effect is only present in an overall P-wave and three-body recombination at threshold vanishes. However, in mixtures of atoms and dimers, scattering cross sections and dimer relaxation show the typical Efimov behavior of log-periodicity. We also consider two-dimensional Bose gases, where the Efimov effect does not occur. For those systems, we derive an equation including the first non-universal corrections and deduce three-body observables such as binding energies and atom-dimer scattering parameters.

•Oct 25, 2011•1 citation

Cumulant theory of the unitary Bose gas: Prethermal and Efimovian dynamics

V. E. Colussi, Hadrien Kurkjian, Mathias Van Regemortel +4 more

We study the quench of a degenerate ultracold Bose gas to the unitary regime, where interactions are as strong as allowed by quantum mechanics. We lay the foundation of a cumulant theory able to simultaneously capture the three-body Efimov effect and ergodic evolution. After an initial period of rapid quantum depletion, a universal prethermal stage is established, characterized by a kinetic temperature and an emergent Bogoliubov dispersion law, while the microscopic degrees of freedom remain far from equilibrium. Integrability is then broken by higher-order interaction terms in the many-body Hamiltonian, leading to a momentum-dependent departure from power law to decaying exponential behavior of the occupation numbers at large momentum. We also find signatures of the Efimov effect in the many-body dynamics and make a precise identification between the observed beating phenomenon and the binding energy of an Efimov trimer. Throughout the paper, our predictions for a uniform gas are quantitatively compared with experimental results for quenched unitary Bose gases in uniform potentials.

arXiv:2007.08935•Physical Review A•Dec 11, 2020•23 citations

Equation of state and contact of a strongly interacting Bose gas in the normal state

Xia-Ji Liu, Brendan C. Mulkerin, Lianyi He +1 more

We theoretically investigate the equation of state and Tan's contact of a nondegenerate three-dimensional Bose gas near a broad Feshbach resonance, within the framework of large-$N$ expansion. Our results agree with the path-integral Monte Carlo simulations in the weak-coupling limit and recover the second-order virial expansion predictions at strong interactions and high temperatures. At resonance, we find that the chemical potential and energy are significantly enhanced by the strong repulsion, while the entropy does not change significantly. With increasing temperature, the two-body contact initially increases and then decreases like ${T}^{\ensuremath{-}1}$ at large temperature, and therefore exhibits a peak structure at about $4{T}_{c0}$, where ${T}_{c0}$ is the Bose-Einstein condensation temperature of an ideal, noninteracting Bose gas. These results may be experimentally examined with a nondegenerate unitary Bose gas, where the three-body recombination rate is substantially reduced. In particular, the nonmonotonic temperature dependence of the two-body contact could be inferred from the momentum distribution measurement.

arXiv:1502.00345•Physical Review A•Apr 27, 2015•7 citations

Dynamics of Three-Body Correlations in Quenched Unitary Bose Gases

V. E. Colussi, John Corson, José Paulo D'Incao

We investigate dynamical three-body correlations in the Bose gas during the earliest stages of evolution after a quench to the unitary regime. The development of few-body correlations is theoretically observed by determining the two- and three-body contacts. We find that the growth of three-body correlations is gradual compared to two-body correlations. The three-body contact oscillates coherently, and we identify this as a signature of Efimov trimers. We show that the growth of three-body correlations depends nontrivially on parameters derived from both the density and Efimov physics. These results demonstrate the violation of scaling invariance of unitary bosonic systems via the appearance of log-periodic modulation of three-body correlations.

arXiv:1710.10580•Physical Review Letters•Mar 9, 2018•41 citations

Unitary boson-boson and boson-fermion mixtures: third virial coefficient and three-body parameter on a narrow Feshbach resonance

Shimpei Endo, Yvan Castin

We give exact integral expressions of the third cluster or virial coefficients of binary mixtures of ideal Bose or Fermi gases, with interspecies interactions of zero range and infinite s-wave scattering length. In general the result depends on three-body parameters Rt appearing in three-body contact conditions, because an Efimov effect is present or because the mixture is in a preefimovian regime with a mass ratio close to an Efimov effect threshold. We give a new, exact integral expression of Rt for the microscopic narrow Feshbach resonance model. A divergence of Rt in the preefimovian regime at a scaling exponent s = 1/2 is predicted and physically discussed. The analytical results are applied to typical species used in cold atom experiments.

arXiv:1608.00403•Aug 1, 2016•5 citations
We compute the virial coefficients, the contact parameters, and the momentum distribution of a strongly interacting three-dimensional Bose gas by means of a virial expansion up to third order in the fugacity, which takes into account three-body correlations exactly. Our results characterize the nondegenerate regime of the interacting Bose gas, where the thermal wavelength is smaller than the interparticle spacing but the scattering length may be arbitrarily large. We observe a rapid variation of the third virial coefficient as the scattering length is tuned across the three-atom and the atom-dimer thresholds. The momentum distribution at unitarity displays a universal high-momentum tail with a log-periodic momentum dependence, which is a direct signature of Efimov physics. We provide a quantitative description of the momentum distribution at high momentum as measured by P. Makotyn et al. [Nat. Phys. 10, 116 (2014)], and our calculations indicate that the lowest trimer state might not be occupied in the experiment. Our results allow for a spectroscopy of Efimov states in the unitary limit.
In a recent experiment with ultracold trapped Rb85 atoms, Makotyn et al. studied a quantum-degenerate Bose gas in the unitary limit where its scattering length is infinitely large. We show that the observed momentum distributions are compatible with a universal relation that expresses the high-momentum tail in terms of the two-body contact C2 and the three-body contact C3. We determine the contact densities for the unitary Bose gas with number density n to be C2 ≈ 20 n(4/3) and C3 ≈ 2n(5/3). We also show that the observed atom loss rate is compatible with that from 3-atom inelastic collisions, which gives a contribution proportional to C3, but the loss rate is not compatible with that from 2-atom inelastic collisions, which gives a contribution proportional to C2. We point out that the contacts C2 and C3 could be measured independently by using the virial theorem near and at unitarity, respectively.
Few-body effects play an important role for the understanding of ultracold quantum gases. We make use of an effective field theory approach to investigate various aspects of universal few-body physics close to a Feshbach resonance. That is the regime where the scattering length is large compared to all other length scales of the system and thus determines the observables. It is also the regime where the Efimov effect whose main characteristic is the occurrence of a sequence of three-body bound states becomes important. At unitarity, i.e., for diverging scattering length, the ratio of binding energies of neighboring states approaches a constant. The existence of those trimers can be captured by a single three-body parameter and influences observables such as recombination rates. Starting from adequate Lagrangians, we derive atom-dimer scattering amplitudes that contain all information of interest about the three-particle systems. With this method, we first investigate the scattering of atoms and dimers at finite temperature in the presence of the Efimov effect. We calculate the dimer relaxation rate and obtain good agreement with available experimental data. Furthermore, heteronuclear mixtures exhibiting large interspecies scattering length are studied in detail. If bosons are the majority species, the Efimov effect occurs in an S-wave channel and we are able to compute three-body recombination and dimer relaxation rates. The results are compared to the outcome of two existing experiments. For mainly fermionic systems, the Efimov effect is only present in an overall P-wave and three-body recombination at threshold vanishes. However, in mixtures of atoms and dimers, scattering cross sections and dimer relaxation show the typical Efimov behavior of log-periodicity. We also consider two-dimensional Bose gases, where the Efimov effect does not occur. For those systems, we derive an equation including the first non-universal corrections and deduce three-body observables such as binding energies and atom-dimer scattering parameters.
We study the quench of a degenerate ultracold Bose gas to the unitary regime, where interactions are as strong as allowed by quantum mechanics. We lay the foundation of a cumulant theory able to simultaneously capture the three-body Efimov effect and ergodic evolution. After an initial period of rapid quantum depletion, a universal prethermal stage is established, characterized by a kinetic temperature and an emergent Bogoliubov dispersion law, while the microscopic degrees of freedom remain far from equilibrium. Integrability is then broken by higher-order interaction terms in the many-body Hamiltonian, leading to a momentum-dependent departure from power law to decaying exponential behavior of the occupation numbers at large momentum. We also find signatures of the Efimov effect in the many-body dynamics and make a precise identification between the observed beating phenomenon and the binding energy of an Efimov trimer. Throughout the paper, our predictions for a uniform gas are quantitatively compared with experimental results for quenched unitary Bose gases in uniform potentials.
We theoretically investigate the equation of state and Tan's contact of a nondegenerate three-dimensional Bose gas near a broad Feshbach resonance, within the framework of large-NNN expansion. Our results agree with the path-integral Monte Carlo simulations in the weak-coupling limit and recover the second-order virial expansion predictions at strong interactions and high temperatures. At resonance, we find that the chemical potential and energy are significantly enhanced by the strong repulsion, while the entropy does not change significantly. With increasing temperature, the two-body contact initially increases and then decreases like ${T}^{\ensuremath{-}1}$ at large temperature, and therefore exhibits a peak structure at about 4Tc04{T}_{c0}4Tc0​, where Tc0{T}_{c0}Tc0​ is the Bose-Einstein condensation temperature of an ideal, noninteracting Bose gas. These results may be experimentally examined with a nondegenerate unitary Bose gas, where the three-body recombination rate is substantially reduced. In particular, the nonmonotonic temperature dependence of the two-body contact could be inferred from the momentum distribution measurement.
We investigate dynamical three-body correlations in the Bose gas during the earliest stages of evolution after a quench to the unitary regime. The development of few-body correlations is theoretically observed by determining the two- and three-body contacts. We find that the growth of three-body correlations is gradual compared to two-body correlations. The three-body contact oscillates coherently, and we identify this as a signature of Efimov trimers. We show that the growth of three-body correlations depends nontrivially on parameters derived from both the density and Efimov physics. These results demonstrate the violation of scaling invariance of unitary bosonic systems via the appearance of log-periodic modulation of three-body correlations.
We give exact integral expressions of the third cluster or virial coefficients of binary mixtures of ideal Bose or Fermi gases, with interspecies interactions of zero range and infinite s-wave scattering length. In general the result depends on three-body parameters Rt appearing in three-body contact conditions, because an Efimov effect is present or because the mixture is in a preefimovian regime with a mass ratio close to an Efimov effect threshold. We give a new, exact integral expression of Rt for the microscopic narrow Feshbach resonance model. A divergence of Rt in the preefimovian regime at a scaling exponent s = 1/2 is predicted and physically discussed. The analytical results are applied to typical species used in cold atom experiments.