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arXiv:2412.08775 · Science Advances

Direct measurement of Tan’s contact in a one-dimensional Lieb-Liniger gas

Qi Huang, Hepeng Yao, Xuzong Chen, Laurent Sanchez-Palencia

Published Oct 3, 2025• 3 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The Tan contact is a pivotal quantity for characterizing many-body quantum systems, bridging microscopic correlations to macroscopic thermodynamic behavior. It is defined as the weight of universal [Formula: see text] momentum tails, but, so far, its direct measurement has been hindered in Bose gases due to interactions strongly altering time-of-flight imaging. Here, we report the first direct measurement of the Tan contact in a strongly correlated Lieb-Liniger gas. Leveraging the one-dimensional geometry of our system, we implement a two-stage expansion scheme, yielding interaction-immune imaging. Our results show good agreement with theoretical predictions and are consistent with a predicted universal scaling law. Our work paves the way for further characterization of the Lieb-Liniger gas across broad interaction regimes and holds promise for extension to other correlated quantum gases in confined geometries.

DOI
10.1126/sciadv.adv3727

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The Tan contact is a pivotal quantity for characterizing many-body quantum systems, bridging microscopic correlations to macroscopic thermodynamic behavior. It is defined as the weight of universal [Formula: see text] momentum tails, but, so far, its direct measurement has been hindered in Bose gases due to interactions strongly altering time-of-flight imaging. Here, we report the first direct measurement of the Tan contact in a strongly correlated Lieb-Liniger gas. Leveraging the one-dimensional geometry of our system, we implement a two-stage expansion scheme, yielding interaction-immune imaging. Our results show good agreement with theoretical predictions and are consistent with a predicted universal scaling law. Our work paves the way for further characterization of the Lieb-Liniger gas across broad interaction regimes and holds promise for extension to other correlated quantum gases in confined geometries.
The universal Tan relations connect a variety of microscopic features of many-body quantum systems with two-body contact interactions to a single quantity, called the contact. The latter has become pivotal in the description of quantum gases. We provide a complete characterization of the Tan contact of the harmonically trapped Lieb-Liniger gas for arbitrary interactions and temperature. Combining thermal Bethe ansatz, local-density approximation, and exact quantum Monte Carlo calculations, we show that the contact is a universal function of only two scaling parameters, and determine the scaling function. We find that the temperature dependence of the contact, or equivalently the interaction dependence of the entropy, displays a maximum. The presence of this maximum provides an unequivocal signature of the crossover to the fermionized regime and it is accessible in current experiments.
Contact interactions play a fundamental role for understanding correlated quantum systems from microscopic models. For example, the 1/k4 momentum tail, the weight of which is known as Tan's contact, reveals a set of universal relations in interacting atomic systems. Nevertheless, the experimental measurement of contact has still remained unexplored for multi-component fermions with high spins. Here, we report on the measurement of s-wave contact parameter in a cold spin-balanced gas of 173Yb atoms with SU(N) symmetry. The high-momentum tail is recorded after time-of-flight expansion, and Tan's contact is directly quantified with a tunable number of spin component N without changing the number of atoms per component. We experimentally verify the linear increase in the contact with N providing experimental confirmation of the SU(N) interaction. Furthermore, we investigate the momentum distribution of SU(N) fermions at the low momentum regime showing that multi-component fermions with large N exhibit a more bosonic behavior. Our measurement directly reveals the interaction effect in a multi-component Fermi gas with SU(N) symmetry, and paves the way for study of many-body physics with high spins.
The main focus of this thesis is the theoretical study of strongly interacting quantum mixtures confined in one dimension and subjected to a harmonic external potential. Such strongly correlated systems can be realized and tested in ultracold atoms experiments. Their non-trivial permutational symmetry properties are investigated, as well as their interplay with correlations. Exploiting an exact solution at strong interactions, we extract general correlation properties encoded in the one-body density matrix and in the associated momentum distributions, in fermionic and Bose-Fermi mixtures. In particular, we obtain substantial results about the short-range behavior, and therefore the high-momentum tails, which display typical k−4k^{-4}k−4 laws. The weights of these tails, denoted as Tan's contacts, are related to numerous thermodynamic properties of the systems such as the two-body correlations, the derivative of the energy with respect to the one-dimensional scattering length, or the static structure factor. We show that these universal Tan's contacts also allow to characterize the spatial symmetry of the systems, and therefore is a deep connection between correlations and symmetries. Besides, the exchange symmetry is extracted using a group theory method, namely the class-sum method, which comes originally from nuclear physics. Moreover, we show that these systems follow a generalized version of the famous Lieb-Mattis theorem. Wishing to make our results as experimentally relevant as possible, we derive scaling laws for Tan's contact as a function of the interaction, temperature and transverse confinement. These laws display interesting effects related to strong correlations and dimensionality.
Many-body fermion systems are important in many branches of physics, including condensed matter, nuclear, and now cold atom physics. In many cases, the interactions between fermions can be approximated by a contact interaction. A recent theoretical advance in the study of these systems is the derivation of a number of exact universal relations that are predicted to be valid for all interaction strengths, temperatures, and spin compositions. These equations, referred to as the Tan relations, relate a microscopic quantity, namely, the amplitude of the high-momentum tail of the fermion momentum distribution, to the thermodynamics of the many-body system. In this work, we provide experimental verification of the Tan relations in a strongly interacting gas of fermionic atoms by measuring both the microscopic and macroscopic quantities in the same system.
We study Tan’s contact, i.e. the coefficient of the high-momentum tails of the momentum distribution at leading order, for an interacting one-dimensional Bose gas subjected to a harmonic confinement. Using a strong-coupling systematic expansion of the ground-state energy of the homogeneous system stemming from the Bethe-Ansatz solution, together with the local-density approximation, we obtain the strong-coupling expansion for Tan’s contact of the harmonically trapped gas. Also, we use a very accurate conjecture for the ground-state energy of the homogeneous system to obtain an approximate expression for Tan’s contact for arbitrary interaction strength, thus estimating the accuracy of the strong-coupling expansion. Our results are relevant for ongoing experiments with ultracold atomic gases.