Abstract To describe long-range behaviour of one particle removed from a few- or a many-body system, a hyperspherical cluster model has been developed. It has been applied to the ground and first excited states of helium drops with five, six, eight and ten atoms interacting via a two-body soft gaussian potential. Convergence of the hyperspherical cluster harmonics expansion is studied for binding energies, root-mean-squared radii and overlaps of the wave functions of two helium drops differing by one atom. It was shown that with increasing model space the functional form of such overlaps at large distances converges to the correct asymptotic behaviour. The asymptotic normalization coefficients that quantify the overlaps’ amplitudes in this region are calculated. It was also shown that in the first excited state one helium atom stays far apart from the rest forming a two-body molecule, or a halo. The probability of finding the halo atom in the classically-forbidden region of space depends on the definition of the latter and on the valence atom binding energy. The total norm of the overlap integrals, the spectroscopic factor, represents the number of partitions of a many-body state into a chosen state of the system with one particle removed. The spectroscopic factors have been calculated and their sum rules are discussed giving a further insight into the structure of helium drops.
Abstract To describe long-range behaviour of one particle removed from a few- or a many-body system, a hyperspherical cluster model has been developed. It has been applied to the ground and first excited states of helium drops with five, six, eight and ten atoms interacting via a two-body soft gaussian potential. Convergence of the hyperspherical cluster harmonics expansion is studied for binding energies, root-mean-squared radii and overlaps of the wave functions of two helium drops differing by one atom. It was shown that with increasing model space the functional form of such overlaps at large distances converges to the correct asymptotic behaviour. The asymptotic normalization coefficients that quantify the overlaps’ amplitudes in this region are calculated. It was also shown that in the first excited state one helium atom stays far apart from the rest forming a two-body molecule, or a halo. The probability of finding the halo atom in the classically-forbidden region of space depends on the definition of the latter and on the valence atom binding energy. The total norm of the overlap integrals, the spectroscopic factor, represents the number of partitions of a many-body state into a chosen state of the system with one particle removed. The spectroscopic factors have been calculated and their sum rules are discussed giving a further insight into the structure of helium drops.
In this paper, we investigate small clusters of helium atoms using the hyperspherical harmonic basis. We consider systems with A=2,3,4,5,6 atoms with an interparticle potential which does not present a strong repulsion at short distances. We use an attractive Gaussian potential that reproduces the values of the dimer binding energy, the atom-atom scattering length, and the effective range obtained with one of the widely used He-He interactions, the Aziz and Slaman potential, called LM2M2. In systems with more than two atoms, we consider a repulsive three-body force that, by construction, reproduces the trimer binding energy of the LM2M2 potential. With this model, consisting of the sum of a two- and three-body potential, we have calculated the spectrum of clusters formed by four, five, and six helium atoms. We have found that these systems present two bound states, one deep and one shallow, close to the threshold fixed by the energy of the $(A\ensuremath{-}1)$-atom system. Universal relations between the energies of the excited state of the A-atom system and the ground-state energy of the $(A\ensuremath{-}1)$-atom system are extracted, as well as the ratio between the ground state of the A-atom system and the ground-state energy of the trimer.
In this work we investigate small clusters of bosons using the hyperspherical harmonic basis. We consider systems with A=2,3,4,5,6 particles interacting through a soft interparticle potential. In order to make contact with a real system, we use an attractive Gaussian potential that reproduces the values of the dimer binding energy and the atom-atom scattering length obtained with one of the most widely used 4He-4He interactions, the LM2M2 potential of Aziz and Slaman. The intensity of the potential is varied in order to explore the clusters' spectra in different regions with large positive and large negative values of the two-body scattering length. In addition, we include a repulsive three-body force to reproduce the trimer binding energy. With this model, consisting in the sum of a two- and three-body potential, we have calculated the spectrum of the four-, five-, and six-particle systems. In all the regions explored, we have found that these systems present two states, one deep and one shallow close to the $A\ensuremath{-}1$ threshold. Some universal relations between the energy levels are extracted; in particular, we have estimated the universal ratios between thresholds of the three-, four-, and five-particle continua using the two-body Gaussian potential. They agree with recent measurements and theoretical predictions.
A formal proof is given that for N-boson systems in which two-body interaction potentials are described by a single Gaussian the ratio of higher-order to the lowest-order hyper-radial potentials decreases at $N\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ensuremath{\infty}$ as ${N}^{\ensuremath{-}1/2}$ or faster. As a result, for such potentials, the convergence of binding energies for ground and several lowest excited states, obtained in expansion of the N-body wave function over the hyperspherical-harmonics basis, improves with increasing number of bosons. For a phenomenological three-body repulsive potential, introduced to account for the missing hard core, the ratio of higher-order to lowest-order hyper-radial potential, corresponding to this three-body potential, also decreases as ${N}^{\ensuremath{-}1/2}$ or faster when $N\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ensuremath{\infty}$. Although adding the three-body contributions leads to increased influence from the total nondiagonal couplings around the node of the lowest hyper-radial potential, the arguments are given that this should not dramatically deteriorate the convergence if the range of repulsion is properly chosen. This means that the hyperspherical-harmonics expansion with soft two-body and repulsive three-body effective forces may become an attractive tool for studying the spectra of many-body systems. It is suggested that fine tuning of the three-body repulsion to reproduce the binding energies over a large region of N is possible. In particular, it has been shown that an N-independent choice for the three-body repulsion exists for which the ground-state binding energies of $N\ensuremath{\le}112$ atoms of helium, obtained in the lowest-order approximation of the hyperspherical-harmonics expansion, are close to the prediction of the Green's function Monte Carlo method with a hard-core He-He potential.
In this work we investigate the structure and dynamics of small clusters of Helium atoms. We consider bound states of clusters having A = 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 atoms and continuum states in the three-atom system. Motivated by the fact that the He-He system has a very large scattering length a compared to the range r 0 of the He-He potential (r 0/a < 1/10), we propose the use of a soft-core interparticle potential. We use an attractive gaussian potential that reproduces the values of the dimer binding energy and the atomatom scattering length obtained with one of the widely used He-He interactions, the LM2M2 potential. In addition, we include a repulsive three-body force to reproduce the trimer binding energy. With this model, consisting in the sum of a two- and a three-body potential, we show the spectrum of the four, five, and sixparticle systems and phase-shifts and inelasticities in the three-atom system. Comparisons to calculations using realistic He-He potentials are given. In addition some universal relations are explored.
The ground state of weakly bound dimers and trimers with a radius extending well into the classically forbidden region is explored, with the goal to test the predicted universality of quantum halo states. The focus of the study is molecules consisting of T↓, D↓, ^{3}He, ^{4}He, and alkali atoms, where the interaction between particles is much better known than in the case of nuclei, which are traditional examples of quantum halos. The study of realistic systems is supplemented by model calculations in order to analyze how low-energy properties depend on the interaction potential. The use of variational and diffusion Monte Carlo methods enabled a very precise calculation of both the size and binding energy of the trimers. In the quantum halo regime, and for large values of scaled binding energies, all clusters follow almost the same universal line. As the scaled binding energy decreases, Borromean states separate from tango trimers.
Abstract This paper describes improved trial wavefunctions for helium clusters and their use in variational QMC calculations of their binding energies, structural properties, and breathing mode vibrational excited states, for clusters of 3 to 270 atoms. The wavefunctions developed were similar to those of earlier work but included convenient analytic functions for two- and three-body correlations. All terms were of the Jastrow exponential form, based on sums of one-, two-, and three-body terms t1(ri), t2(rij), and t3(rij, rjk,rki), expressed as functions of interparticle distances. Excited-state wavefunctions for the breathing vibrational mode were obtained with the aid of procedures adapted from treatment of the quantum mechanics of liquid drop models. The interactions of helium atoms were specified as pairwise-additive with an accurate semi-empirical pair potential. Optimizations of parameters in the trial wavefunctions were carried out for individual cluster sizes with an exhaustive search procedure in a series of trial variational calculations, in which the parameters were varied to minimize the energy. A partial correlation of results was obtained by use of identical initial coordinates and random number seeds in these optimization calculations. Once the wavefunctions were optimized, longer calculations were used to determine properties of the clusters. In addition, diffusion QMC calculations were used to obtain more accurate nonvariational energies for comparisons.