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arXiv:1901.11122 · Atoms

Two-Body and Three-Body Contacts for Three Bosons in the Unitary Regime: Analytic Expressions and Limiting Forms

V. E. Colussi

Published Feb 5, 2019• 6 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The two- and three-body contacts are central to a set of univeral relations between microscopic few-body physics within an ultracold Bose gas and its thermodynamical properties. They may also be defined in trapped few-particle systems, which is the subject of this work. In this work, we focus on the unitary three-body problem in a trap, where interactions are as strong as allowed by quantum mechanics. We derive analytic results for the two- and three-body contacts in this regime and compare them with existing limiting expressions and previous numerical studies.

DOI
10.3390/atoms7010019

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The two- and three-body contacts are central to a set of univeral relations between microscopic few-body physics within an ultracold Bose gas and its thermodynamical properties. They may also be defined in trapped few-particle systems, which is the subject of this work. In this work, we focus on the unitary three-body problem in a trap, where interactions are as strong as allowed by quantum mechanics. We derive analytic results for the two- and three-body contacts in this regime and compare them with existing limiting expressions and previous numerical studies.
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 physics has played a prominent role in atomic, molecular and nuclear physics since the early days of quantum mechanics. It is now possible-thanks to tremendous progress in cooling, trapping and manipulating ultracold samples-to experimentally study few-body phenomena in trapped atomic and molecular systems with unprecedented control. This review summarizes recent studies of few-body phenomena in trapped atomic and molecular gases, with an emphasis on small trapped systems. We start by introducing the free-space scattering properties and then investigate what happens when two particles, bosons or fermions, are placed in an external confinement. Next, various three-body systems are treated analytically in limiting cases. Our current understanding of larger two-component Fermi systems and Bose systems is reviewed, and connections with the corresponding bulk systems are established. Lastly, future prospects and challenges are discussed. Throughout this review, commonalities with other systems such as nuclei or quantum dots are highlighted.
Macro properties of cold atomic gases are driven by few-body correlations, even if the gas has thousands of particles. Quantum systems composed of two and three particles with attractive zero\=/range pairwise interactions are considered for general masses and interaction strengths in two and three dimensions (2D and 3D). The Faddeev decomposition is used to derive the equations for the bound state, which is the starting point for the investigation of universal properties of few\=/body systems, i.e. those that all potentials with the same physics at low energy are able to describe in a model\=/independent form. In 2D, the number of bound states in a three\=/body system increases without bound as the mass of one particle becomes much lighter than the other two. The analytic form of an effective potential between the heavy particles explains the mass\=/dependence on the number of bound energy levels. An exact analytic expression for the large\=/momentum asymptotic behaviour of the spectator function in the Faddeev equation is presented. The spectator function and its asymptotic form define the two- and three\=/body contact parameters. The two\=/body parameter is found to be independent of the quantum state in some specific 2D systems. The 2D and 3D momentum distributions have a distinct sub\=/leading form whereas the 3D term depends on the mass of the particles. A model that interpolates between 2D and 3D is proposed and a sharp transition in the energy spectrum of three-body systems is found.
Abstract We revisit the properties of the two-component Fermi gas with short-range interactions in three dimensions, in the limit where the s -wave scattering length diverges. Such a unitary Fermi gas possesses universal thermodynamic and dynamical observables that are independent of any interaction length scale. Focusing on trapped systems of N fermions, where N ≤ 10 , we investigate how well we can determine the zero-temperature behavior of the many-body system from published few-body data on the ground-state energy and the contact. For the unpolarized case, we find that the Bertsch parameters extracted from trapped few-body systems all lie within 15% of the established value. Furthermore, the few-body values for the contact are well within the range of values determined in the literature for the many-body system. In the limit of large spin polarization, we obtain a similar accuracy for the polaron energy, and we estimate the polaron’s effective mass from the dependence of its energy on N . We also compute an upper bound for the squared wave-function overlap between the unitary Fermi system and the non-interacting ground state, both for the trapped and uniform cases. This allows us to prove that the trapped unpolarized ground state at unitarity has zero overlap with its non-interacting counterpart in the many-body limit N → ∞ .
The quenched unitary Bose gas is a paradigmatic example of a strongly interacting out-of-equilibrium quantum system, whose dynamics become difficult to describe theoretically due to the growth of non-Gaussian quantum correlations. We develop a conserving many-body theory capable of capturing these effects, allowing us to model the postquench dynamics in the previously inaccessible time regime where the gas departs from the universal prethermal stage. Our results show that this departure is driven by the growth of strong lossless three-body correlations, rather than atomic losses, thus framing the heating of the gas in this regime as a fully coherent phenomenon. We uncover the specific few-body scattering processes that affect this heating and show that the expected connection between the two-body and three-body contacts and the tail of the momentum distribution is obscured following the prethermal stage, explaining the absence of this connection in experiments. Our general framework, which reframes the dynamics of unitary quantum systems in terms of explicit connections to microscopic physics, can be broadly applied to any quantum system containing strong few-body correlations. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
We derive the explicit three-body contact potential for a dilute condensed Bose gas from microscopic theory. The three-body coupling constant exhibits the general form predicted by Wu [Phys. Rev. 115, 1390 (1959)]] and is determined in terms of the amplitudes of two- and three-body collisions in vacuum. In the present form, the coupling constant becomes accessible to quantitative studies which should provide the crucial link between few-body collisions and the stability of condensates with attractive two-body forces.