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arXiv:2108.13806 · Physical Review A

Strongly bound fermion pairs on a ring: A composite-boson approach

Eloisa Cuestas, Cecilia Cormick

Published Jan 5, 2022• 5 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Particles made of two fermions can in many cases be treated as elementary bosons, but the conditions for this treatment to be valid are nontrivial. The so-called ``coboson formalism'' is a powerful tool to tackle compositeness effects relevant for instance for exciton physics and ultracold atomic dimers. A key element of this theory is an ansatz for the ground state of $N$ pairs, built from the single-pair ground state combined with the exclusion principle. We show that this ansatz can fail in one-dimensional systems which fulfill the conditions expected to make the ansatz valid. Nevertheless, we also explain how coboson theory can recover the correct ground state. Thus, our work highlights limitations and strengths of the formalism and leads to a better treatment of composite bosons.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.105.013302

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Particles made of two fermions can in many cases be treated as elementary bosons, but the conditions for this treatment to be valid are nontrivial. The so-called ``coboson formalism'' is a powerful tool to tackle compositeness effects relevant for instance for exciton physics and ultracold atomic dimers. A key element of this theory is an ansatz for the ground state of NNN pairs, built from the single-pair ground state combined with the exclusion principle. We show that this ansatz can fail in one-dimensional systems which fulfill the conditions expected to make the ansatz valid. Nevertheless, we also explain how coboson theory can recover the correct ground state. Thus, our work highlights limitations and strengths of the formalism and leads to a better treatment of composite bosons.
The understanding of the behavior of systems of identical composite bosons has progressed significantly in connection with the analysis of the entanglement between constituents and the development of coboson theory. The basis of these treatments is a coboson ansatz for the ground state of a system of NNN pairs, stating that in appropriate limits this state is well approximated by the account of Pauli exclusion in what would otherwise be the product state of NNN independent pairs, each described by the single-pair ground state. In this work we study the validity of this ansatz for particularly simple problems, and show that short-range attractive interactions in very dilute limits and a single-pair ground state with very large entanglement are not enough to render the ansatz valid. On the contrary, we find that the dimensionality of the problem plays a crucial role in the behavior of the many-body ground state.
This paper shows the necessity of introducing a quantum object, the ``coboson,'' to properly describe, through a fermion scheme, any composite particle, such as the exciton, which is made of two fermions. Although commonly dealt with as elementary bosons, these composite bosons---cobosons in short---differ from them due to their composite nature which makes the handling of their many-body effects quite different from the existing treatments valid for elementary bosons. As a direct consequence of this composite nature, there is no correct way to describe the interaction between cobosons as a potential VVV. This is rather dramatic because, with the Hamiltonian not written as H=H0+VH={H}_{0}+VH=H0​+V, all the usual approaches to many-body effects fail. In particular, the standard form of the Fermi golden rule, written in terms of VVV, cannot be used to obtain the transition rates of two cobosons. To get them, we have had to construct an unconventional expression for this Fermi golden rule in which HHH only appears. Making use of this expression, we give here a detailed calculation of the time evolution of two excitons. We compare the results of this exact approach with the ones obtained by using an effective bosonic Hamiltonian in which the excitons are considered as elementary bosons with effective scatterings between them, these scatterings resulting from an elaborate mapping between the two-fermion space and the ideal boson space. We show that the relation between the inverse lifetime and the sum of the transition rates for elementary bosons differs from the one of the composite bosons by a factor of 1∕21∕21∕2, so that it is impossible to find effective scatterings between bosonic excitons giving these two physical quantities correctly, whatever the mapping from composite bosons to elementary bosons is. The present paper thus constitutes a strong mathematical proof that, in spite of a widely spread belief, we cannot forget the composite nature of these cobosons, even in the extremely low-density limit of just two excitons. This paper also shows the (unexpected) cancellation in the Born approximation of the two-exciton transition rate for a finite value of the momentum transfer.
We analyze a system of fermions in a one dimensional harmonic trap with attractive delta-interactions between different fermions species, as an approximate description of experiments involving atomic dimers. We solve the problem of two fermion pairs numerically using the so-called "coboson formalism" as an alternative to techniques which are based on the single-particle basis. This allows us to explore the strongly bound regime, approaching the limit of infinite attraction in which the composite particles behave as hard-core bosons. Our procedure is computationally inexpensive and illustrates how the coboson toolbox is useful for ultracold atom systems even in absence of condensation.
Ultracold atomic systems provide a versatile platform for exploring quantum phenomena, offering tunable interactions and diverse trapping geometries. In this study, we investigate a one-dimensional system of trapped fermionic atoms using the composite boson formalism, which describes pairs of opposite-spin fermions as cobosons (short for composite bosons). We solve the Schr\"odinger equation for a $2\ensuremath{\uparrow}+2\ensuremath{\downarrow}$ fermionic system across a broad range of attractive and repulsive interactions by constructing the system's wave function as a superposition of two-coboson states. We determine key observables such as particle density profiles and two-body correlations. The density profiles calculated agree with both the Tonks-Girardeau and Lieb-Liniger limits and provide a portrait of the transition between those regimes. In the strong repulsive regime, the ansatz captures the Fridel-Wigner transition characterized by a doubling of the peaks in the density profiles. Additionally, we compute the low-lying energy spectrum and estimate the pairing gap. Our results highlight the usefulness of the coboson superposition ansatz for exploring quantum phenomena in strongly correlated few-body systems.
Abstract This book bridges the gap between two major fields in condensed matter physics: semiconductors and superconductors. Through an original perspective that their key particles, excitons and Cooper pairs, are composite bosons (cobosons), the book raises fundamental questions: how does the Pauli exclusion principle affect the fermionic components of bosonic particles at the microscopic level, and how does this appear in the coboson many-body physics at the macroscopic level? What insights would the study of Wannier excitons, Frenkel excitons, and Cooper pairs provide about the “bosonic condensation” of composite bosons and how it differs from the Bose-Einstein condensation of elementary bosons? The book starts from a solid mathematical and physical foundation to derive excitons and Cooper pairs and introduces Shiva diagrams as a graphic support to grasp the many-body physics induced by fermion exchange in the absence of fermion-fermion interaction–a mechanism not visualized in standard Feynman diagrams. The book also covers composite bosons related to excitons: trions, biexcitons, and polaritons. The last part of the book is devoted to composite boson condensation, from the prototypical Bose-Einstein condensation of free elementary bosons and the consequence of interaction, to interacting electrons in the dense regime, to electron-hole pairs in the dense and dilute regimes. Advanced undergraduate and graduate students in physics, with no prior background, will benefit from this book, as numerous appendices provide the materials required to follow the various chapters. The concepts and formalism presented should also prove useful in research on ultracold atomic gases, polariton condensation, and quantum information.
We derive the scattering length of composite bosons (cobosons) within the framework of the composite-boson many-body formalism that uses correlated-pair states as a basis instead of free-fermion states. The integral equation constructed from this physically relevant basis makes transparent the role of fermion exchange in the coboson-coboson effective scattering. Three potentials used for Cooper pairs, fermionic-atom dimers, and semiconductor excitons are considered. While the sss-wave scattering length for the BCS-like potential is just equal to its Born value, the other two are substantially smaller. For fermionic-atom dimers and semiconductor excitons, our results, calculated within a restricted correlated-pair basis, are in good agreement with those obtained from procedures numerically more demanding. We also propose model coboson-coboson scatterings that are separable and thus easily workable and that produce scattering lengths which match quantitatively well with the numerically obtained values for all fermion mass ratios. These separable model scatterings can facilitate future works on many-body effects in coboson gases.