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arXiv:2008.02824 · Physical Review Letters

Structure Factors of Neutron Matter at Finite Temperature

Andrei Alexandru, Paulo F. Bedaque, Evan Berkowitz, Neill C. Warrington

Published Apr 2, 2021• 12 citations
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Abstract

We compute continuum and infinite volume limit extrapolations of the structure factors of neutron matter at finite temperature and density. Using a lattice formulation of leading-order pionless effective field theory, we compute the momentum dependence of the structure factors at finite temperature and at densities beyond the reach of the virial expansion. The Tan contact parameter is computed and the result agrees with the high momentum tail of the vector structure factor. All errors, statistical and systematic, are controlled for. This calculation is a first step towards a model-independent understanding of the linear response of neutron matter at finite temperature.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.126.132701

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We compute continuum and infinite volume limit extrapolations of the structure factors of neutron matter at finite temperature and density. Using a lattice formulation of leading-order pionless effective field theory, we compute the momentum dependence of the structure factors at finite temperature and at densities beyond the reach of the virial expansion. The Tan contact parameter is computed and the result agrees with the high momentum tail of the vector structure factor. All errors, statistical and systematic, are controlled for. This calculation is a first step towards a model-independent understanding of the linear response of neutron matter at finite temperature.
Thermal properties of low-density neutron matter are investigated by determinantal quantum Monte Carlo lattice calculations on 3+1 dimensional cubic lattices. Nuclear effective field theory (EFT) is applied using the pionless single- and two-parameter neutron-neutron interactions, determined from the 1S0{}^{1}{S}_{0}1S0​ scattering length and effective range. The determination of the interactions and the calculations of neutron matter are carried out consistently by applying EFT power counting rules. The thermodynamic limit is taken by the method of finite-size scaling, and the continuum limit is examined in the vanishing lattice filling limit. The 1S0{}^{1}{S}_{0}1S0​ pairing gap at $T\ensuremath{\approx}0$ is computed directly from the off-diagonal long-range order of the spin pair-pair correlation function and is found to be approximately 30% smaller than BCS calculations with the conventional nucleon-nucleon potentials. The critical temperature Tc{T}_{c}Tc​ of the normal-to-superfluid phase transition and the pairing temperature scale T∗{T}^{*}T∗ are determined, and the temperature-density phase diagram is constructed. The physics of low-density neutron matter is clearly identified as being a BCS-Bose-Einstein condensation crossover.
We compute with lattice field theory the vector and axial static structure factors of the unitary gas for arbitrary temperature above the superfluid transition and for fugacities 0.1<z<1.00.1<z<1.00.1<z<1.0. Using the lattice formulation, we calculate beyond the validity of the virial expansion, a commonly used technique in many-body physics. We find qualitative differences in the behavior of the structure factors at high fugacity compared to the predictions of the virial expansion. Due to the large scattering length of neutrons, we expect the unitary gas structure factors to approximate the structure factors of hot neutron gases, and we therefore expect our calculations to be useful in supernova simulations, where neutron gas structure factors are needed to compute in-medium neutrino-neutron scattering rates.
This is the second of two articles that investigate cold dilute neutron matter on the lattice using pionless effective field theory. In the unitary limit, where the effective range is zero and scattering length is infinite, simple scaling relations relate thermodynamic functions at different temperatures. When the second virial coefficient is properly tuned, we find that the lattice results obey these scaling relations. We compute the energy per particle, pressure, spin susceptibility, dineutron correlation function, and an upper bound for the superfluid critical temperature.
Universality of strongly interacting fermions is a topic of great interest in diverse fields. Here we investigate theoretically the universal dynamic density response of resonantly interacting ultracold Fermi atoms in the limit of either high temperature or large frequency. At high temperature, we use quantum virial expansion to derive universal, nonperturbative expansion functions of the dynamic structure factor; at large momentum, we conjecture that the second-order expansion function gives the Wilson coefficient used in the operator product expansion method. The dynamic structure factor is therefore determined by its second-order expansion function with an overall normalization factor given by Tan's [S. Tan, Ann. Phys. (NY) 323, 2952 (2008); S. Tan, Ann. Phys. (NY) 323, 2971 (2008); S. Tan, Ann. Phys. (NY) 323, 2987 (2008)] contact parameter. We show that the spin-parallel and -antiparallel dynamic structure factors have, respectively, a tail of the form $\ensuremath{\sim}\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}{\ensuremath{\omega}}^{\ensuremath{-}5/2}$ for $\ensuremath{\omega}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ensuremath{\infty}$, decaying slower than the total dynamic structure factor found previously ($\ensuremath{\sim}{\ensuremath{\omega}}^{\ensuremath{-}7/2}$). Our predictions for the dynamic structure factor at high temperature or large frequency are testable using Bragg spectroscopy for ultracold atomic Fermi gases.
We study cold dilute neutron matter on the lattice using an effective field theory. We work in the unitary limit in which the scattering length is much larger than the interparticle spacing. In this article we focus on the equation of state at temperatures above the Fermi temperature and compare lattice simulations to the virial expansion on the lattice and in the continuum. We find that in the unitary limit lattice discretization errors in the second virial coefficient are significantly enhanced. As a consequence the equation of state does not show the universal scaling behavior expected in the unitary limit. We suggest that scaling can be improved by tuning the second virial coefficient rather than the scattering length.
We theoretically investigate the static structure factor of an interacting Fermi gas near the BEC-BCS crossover at large momenta. Due to short-range two-body interactions, we show that the structure factor of unlike spin correlations S ↑↓ ( q ) falls off as 1/ q in a universal scaling region with large momentum ℏ q and large scattering length. The scaling coefficient is determined by the celebrated Tan's contact parameter, which links the short-range behavior of many-body systems to their universal thermodynamic properties. By implementing this structure-factor Tan relation together with the random-phase approximation and the virial expansion theory in various limiting cases, we show how to calculate S ↑↓ ( q ) at zero and finite temperatures for arbitrary interaction strengths, at momentum transfer higher than the Fermi momentum. Our results provide a way to experimentally confirm one of the Tan relations and to accurately measure the value of contact parameter.