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arXiv:2412.17078 · SciPost Physics

Beyond-mean-field analysis of the Townes soliton and its breathing mode

Dmitry S. Petrov

Published Aug 13, 2025• 1 citation
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Abstract

By using the Bogoliubov perturbation theory we describe the self-bound ground state and excited breathing states of N N two-dimensional bosons with zero-range attractive interactions. Our results for the ground state energy B_N B N and size R_N R N improve previously known large- N N asymptotes and we better understand the crossover to the few-body regime. The breathing oscillations, absent at the mean-field level, result from the quantum-mechanical breaking of the mean-field scale symmetry. The breathing-mode frequency scales as \Omega\propto |B_N|/\sqrt{N} Ω ∝ | B N | / N at large N N .

DOI
10.21468/scipostphys.19.2.037

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By using the Bogoliubov perturbation theory we describe the self-bound ground state and excited breathing states of N N two-dimensional bosons with zero-range attractive interactions. Our results for the ground state energy B_N B N and size R_N R N improve previously known large- N N asymptotes and we better understand the crossover to the few-body regime. The breathing oscillations, absent at the mean-field level, result from the quantum-mechanical breaking of the mean-field scale symmetry. The breathing-mode frequency scales as \Omega\propto |B_N|/\sqrt{N} Ω ∝ | B N | / N at large N N .
We investigate the ground-state properties of N bosons with attractive zero-range interactions characterized by the scattering length a > 0 and confined to the surface of a sphere of radius R. We present the analytic solution of the problem for N = 2, mean-field analysis for N→∞, and exact diffusion Monte Carlo results for intermediate N. For finite N, we observe a smooth crossover from the uniform state in the limit a/R≫1 (weak attraction) to a localized state at small a/R (strong attraction). With increasing N, this crossover narrows down to a discontinuous transition from the uniform state to a soliton of size ∼R/N. The two states are separated by an energy barrier, tunneling under which is exponentially suppressed at large N. The system behavior is marked by a peculiar competition between space-curvature effects and beyond-mean-field terms, both breaking the scaling invariance of a two-dimensional mean-field theory.
We present semianalytical many-body results for energies and excitation frequencies for an inhomogeneous Bose-Einstein condensate over a wide range of atom numbers NNN for both small sss-wave scattering lengths, typical of most laboratory experiments, and large scattering lengths, achieved by tuning through a Feshbach resonance. Our dimensional perturbation treatment includes two-body correlations at all orders and yields analytical results through first order by taking advantage of the high degree of symmetry of the condensate at the zeroth-order limit. Because NNN remains a parameter in our analytical results, the challenge of calculating energies and excitation frequencies does not rise with the number of condensate atoms. In this proof-of-concept paper the atoms are confined in a spherical trap and are treated as hard spheres. Our many-body calculations compare well to Gross-Pitaevskii results in the weakly interacting regime and depart from the mean-field approximation as the density approaches the strongly interacting regime. The excitation frequencies provide a particularly sensitive test of beyond-mean-field corrections. For example, for N=2000N=2000N=2000 atoms and an experimentally realized large scattering length of $a=0.433{a}_{ho}\phantom{\rule{0.3em}{0ex}}({a}_{ho}=\sqrt{\ensuremath{\hbar}∕m{\ensuremath{\omega}}_{ho}})$ we predict a 7575%75 shift from the mean-field breathing mode frequency.
We develop a theory of non-relativistic bosons in two spatial dimensions with a weak short range attractive interaction. In the limit as the range of the interaction becomes small, there is an ultra-violet divergence in the problem. We devise a scheme to remove this divergence and produce a completely finite formulation of the theory. This involves reformulating the dynamics in terms of a new operator whose eigenvalues give the {\it logarithm} of the energy levels. Then, a mean field theory is developed which allows us to describe the limit of a large number of bosons. The ground state is a new kind of condensate (soliton) of bosons that breaks translation invariance spontaneously. The ground state energy is negative and its magnitude grows {\it exponentially} with the number of particles, rather than like a power law as for conventional many body systems.
We study the ground state of the attractive one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model, and in particular the nature of the crossover between the weak interaction and strong interaction regimes for finite system sizes. Indicator properties such as the gap between the ground and first excited energy levels, and the incremental ground-state wave function overlaps are used to locate different regimes. Using mean-field theory we predict that there are two distinct crossovers connected to spontaneous symmetry breaking of the ground state. The first crossover arises in an analysis valid for large LLL with finite NNN, where LLL is the number of lattice sites and NNN is the total particle number. An alternative approach valid for large NNN with finite LLL yields a second crossover. For small system sizes we numerically investigate the model and observe that there are signatures of both crossovers. We compare with exact results from Bethe ansatz methods in several limiting cases to explore the validity for these numerical and mean-field schemes. The results indicate that for finite attractive systems there are generically three ground-state phases of the model.
We study the ground state energy of trapped two-dimensional Bose gases with mean-field type interactions that can be attractive. We prove the stability of second kind of the many-body system and the convergence of the ground state energy per particle to that of a non-linear Schrödinger (NLS) energy functional. Notably, we can take any polynomial scaling of the interaction, and even exponential scalings arbitrarily close to the Gross–Pitaevskii regime, which is a drastic improvement on the best-known result for systems with attractive interactions. As a consequence of the stability of second kind we also obtain Bose–Einstein condensation for the many-body ground states for a much improved range of the diluteness parameter.
We employ mean-field, Bogoliubov and many-body theories to study critical fluctuations in the position and momentum of a Bose-Einstein condensate whose translation symmetry is spontaneously broken due to attractive interactions. In a homogeneous system, the many-body ground state of the symmetry-preserving Hamiltonian is very fragile against superposition of low-lying states, while the mean-field theory predicts a stable bright soliton which spontaneously breaks translation symmetry. We show that weak symmetry-breaking perturbations cause the translation-symmetric many-body ground state to cross over to a many-body bright soliton. We argue that the center-of-mass fluctuations in the soliton state arise primarily from the depletion of the condensate to translation modes. We develop an extended mean-field theory to analytically reproduce these results obtained by the exact diagonalization method.