The many-body physics of composite bosons

Monique Combescot, Shiue-Yuan Shiau

This book bridges a gap between two major communities of Condensed Matter Physics, Semiconductors and Superconductors, that have thrived independently. Through an original perspective that their key particles, excitons and Cooper pairs, are composite bosons, the authors raise fundamental questions of current interest: how does the Pauli exclusion principle wield its power on the fermionic components of bosonic particles at a microscopic level and how this affects the macroscopic physics? What can we learn from Wannier and Frenkel excitons and from Cooper pairs that helps us understand "bosonic condensation" of composite bosons and its difference from Bose-Einstein condensation of elementary bosons? The authors start from solid mathematical and physical foundation to derive excitons and Cooper pairs. They further introduce Shiva diagrams as a graphic support to grasp the many-body physics induced by fermion exchange - a novel mechanism not visualized by standard Feynman diagrams. Advanced undergraduate or graduate students in physics with no prior background will benefit from this book. The developed concepts and methodology should also be useful to present researches on ultracold atomic gases, exciton-polaritons, and quantum information.

Wesley E. Brittin, A.Y. Sakakura

Daniel Huerga, J. Dukelsky, Gustavo E. Scuseria

We present a canonical mapping transforming physical boson operators into quadratic products of cluster composite bosons that preserves matrix elements of operators when a physical constraint is enforced. We map the 2D lattice Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian into 2×2 composite bosons and solve it within a generalized Hartree-Bogoliubov approximation. The resulting Mott insulator-superfluid phase diagram reproduces well quantum Monte Carlo results. The Higgs boson behavior in the superfluid phase along the unit density line is unraveled and in remarkable agreement with experiments. Results for the properties of the ground and excited states are competitive with other state-of-the-art approaches, but at a fraction of their computational cost. The composite boson mapping here introduced can be readily applied to frustrated many-body systems where most methodologies face significant hurdles.

Peter A. Ring, Y. K. Gambhir, S. Iwasaki +1 more

Monique Combescot, Shiue-Yuan Shiau

Abstract This book bridges the gap between two major fields in condensed matter physics: semiconductors and superconductors. Through an original perspective that their key particles, excitons and Cooper pairs, are composite bosons (cobosons), the book raises fundamental questions: how does the Pauli exclusion principle affect the fermionic components of bosonic particles at the microscopic level, and how does this appear in the coboson many-body physics at the macroscopic level? What insights would the study of Wannier excitons, Frenkel excitons, and Cooper pairs provide about the “bosonic condensation” of composite bosons and how it differs from the Bose-Einstein condensation of elementary bosons? The book starts from a solid mathematical and physical foundation to derive excitons and Cooper pairs and introduces Shiva diagrams as a graphic support to grasp the many-body physics induced by fermion exchange in the absence of fermion-fermion interaction–a mechanism not visualized in standard Feynman diagrams. The book also covers composite bosons related to excitons: trions, biexcitons, and polaritons. The last part of the book is devoted to composite boson condensation, from the prototypical Bose-Einstein condensation of free elementary bosons and the consequence of interaction, to interacting electrons in the dense regime, to electron-hole pairs in the dense and dilute regimes. Advanced undergraduate and graduate students in physics, with no prior background, will benefit from this book, as numerous appendices provide the materials required to follow the various chapters. The concepts and formalism presented should also prove useful in research on ultracold atomic gases, polariton condensation, and quantum information.

E. Schachinger, Mitter, H, H. Sormann