A generic scenario of a crossover between weak-coupling and strong-coupling limits of a many-body quantum system is studied. Powerful numerical methods of investigating the strongly correlated regime are developed and applied to answering a number of important questions of the strongly correlated fermions physics. The internal structure of an exciton in an insulating medium is studied throughout the crossover between the (analytically solvable) strong- and weak-coupling limits. In the intermediate regime, accurate results for the exciton ground state are obtained and used to establish the limits of applicability of the corresponding limiting cases for the first time. A novel combination of the diagrammatic determinant Monte Carlo and the worm algorithm is developed and used for investigating the unitarity regime of the BEC-BCS crossover via simulating the dilute Fermi-Hubbard model. Superfluid phase transition and thermodynamic properties of the normal state are characterized for both lattice fermions and continuum unitary Fermi gas. The relation to current experiments with trapped ultracold quantum gases is discussed.
We investigate the ground-state properties of trapped fermion systems described by the Hubbard model with an external confining potential. We discuss the universal behaviors of systems in different regimes: from few particles, i.e., in dilute regimes, to the trap thermodynamic limit. The asymptotic trap-size (TS) dependence in the dilute regime (increasing the trap size $\ensuremath{\ell}$ keeping the particle number
N fixed) is described by a universal TS scaling controlled by the dilute fixed point associated with the metal-to-vacuum quantum transition. This scaling behavior is numerically checked by DMRG simulations of the one-dimensional (1D) Hubbard model. In particular, the particle density and its correlations show crossovers among different regimes: for strongly repulsive interactions they approach those of a spinless Fermi gas, for weak interactions those of a free Fermi gas, and for strongly attractive interactions they match those of a gas of hard-core bosonic molecules. The large-
N limit keeping the ratio $N/\ensuremath{\ell}$ fixed corresponds to a 1D trap thermodynamic limit. We address issues related to the accuracy of the local density approximation (LDA). We show that the particle density approaches its LDA in the large-$\ensuremath{\ell}$ limit. When the trapped system is in the metallic phase, corrections at finite $\ensuremath{\ell}$ are $O({\ensuremath{\ell}}^{\ensuremath{-}1})$ and oscillating around the center of the trap. They become significantly larger at the boundary of the fermion cloud, where they get suppressed as $O({\ensuremath{\ell}}^{\ensuremath{-}1/3})$ only. This anomalous behavior arises from the nontrivial scaling at the metal-to-vacuum transition occurring at the boundaries of the fermion cloud.
We show that a two-component mixture of a few repulsively interacting ultracold atoms in a one-dimensional trap possesses very diverse quantum regimes and that the crossover between them can be induced by tuning the interactions in one of the species. Starting from the composite fermionization regime, in which the interactions between both components are large and neither gas is phase coherent, our results show that a phase-separated state can be reached by increasing the interaction in one of the species. In this regime, the weakly interacting component stays at the center of the trap and becomes almost fully phase coherent, while the strongly interacting one is expelled to the edges of the trap. The crossover is sharp, as can be witnessed in the system's energy and in the occupation of the lowest natural orbital of the weakly interacting species. We show that such a transition is a few-atom effect which disappears for a large population imbalance.