Improved estimates of few-body ground-state energies

C. Ciofi degli Atti, Francesco Calogero

Silvano Simula

Claes Rogius Svensson

In this thesis a method for doing approximate calculations of the ground state of quantum mechanical many-body systems is developed and implemented. This method uses the Hartree-Fock method as a starting point and approximates the ground state as a linear combination of non-orthogonal Slater determinants. The Slater determinants are added consecutively by minimising their associated energy while keeping the previously found Slater determinants fixed. This method was tested on a quantum harmonic oscillator filled with interacting fermions and was found to give good approximations to the ground state of this system with only a few Slater determinants. Error estimation of the approximated ground state is done by calculating the energy variance. The energy variance was used in two different methods for improving upon the approximated energy, both of which was found to work well.

Jesper Levinsen, Pietro Massignan, Shimpei Endo +1 more

Abstract We revisit the properties of the two-component Fermi gas with short-range interactions in three dimensions, in the limit where the s -wave scattering length diverges. Such a unitary Fermi gas possesses universal thermodynamic and dynamical observables that are independent of any interaction length scale. Focusing on trapped systems of N fermions, where N ≤ 10 , we investigate how well we can determine the zero-temperature behavior of the many-body system from published few-body data on the ground-state energy and the contact. For the unpolarized case, we find that the Bertsch parameters extracted from trapped few-body systems all lie within 15% of the established value. Furthermore, the few-body values for the contact are well within the range of values determined in the literature for the many-body system. In the limit of large spin polarization, we obtain a similar accuracy for the polaron energy, and we estimate the polaron’s effective mass from the dependence of its energy on N . We also compute an upper bound for the squared wave-function overlap between the unitary Fermi system and the non-interacting ground state, both for the trapped and uniform cases. This allows us to prove that the trapped unpolarized ground state at unitarity has zero overlap with its non-interacting counterpart in the many-body limit N → ∞ .

S. K. Bogner

Morten Piibeleht

Quantum many-body systems can be studied theoretically from first principles using microscopic models, but the computational cost of numerically exact calculations increases exponentially with the number of particles and the complexity of the interaction, limiting the systems that can be analysed. The Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov (HFB) and quasiparticle random phase approximation (QRPA) methods, heavily used in nuclear physics, rely on mean-field approximations but scale more favourably with increasing system size and complexity. In this work we apply these methods to the problem of a two-dimensional harmonically trapped Fermi gas with attractive interactions, with the goal of investigating the validity of the approximations in the few-body limit. We implement the approximate methods in code and then compare them with exact calculations. We find that the HFB method can account for pairing correlations that arise due to the attractive interaction, predicting well the ground state energy even at high interaction strengths. Also, the excitation spectra predicted by the QRPA method qualitatively match the true spectra, reproducing the expected subset of excitations. Finally, we see that perturbative corrections can be used to improve the ground state energy estimate of the HFB.