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Dynamical symmetry-breaking and the mean-field approach in microscopic nuclear theory

E. D. D. Davis

Published Jan 19, 2015• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

The "phase transitions" predicted within finite microscopic systems by Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov (HFB) and aspects of the use of the associated broken-syrometry bases in the random-phase approximation (RPA) are considered using soluble models-Evidence is presented in support of the conjecture that the success of these techniques lies in the fact that they mimic singularities in the dependence on interaction strengths of the exact solution.This conjecture provides a natural explanation for why such methods fail close to a point where a phase transition occurs and indicates possible directions for improvement.Phase diagrams at both zero and finite temperature are determined, and simple analytic expressions for the way in which critical scrcn;the scale with particle number are found.It is shown that the ''phase transitions" predicted at finite temperature are relevant.A connection between the singularities referred to above and real phase transitions found in the thermodynamic limit is discussed.It is found that only stable bases can be used in an RPA calculation.This is in particular true for those RPA modes which are not associated with the onset of instability of the basis; these modes do not describe any excited state when tht. basis is unstable.Outside transitional regions certain undesirable features of HFB are unearthed, notably that the HFB ground state energy is not necessarily an upper bound to the exact ground state energy.The effectiveness in this regime of the Hartree-Fock Seniority approximation as a substitute to projection methods is ■ -■■.ated.

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The "phase transitions" predicted within finite microscopic systems by Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov (HFB) and aspects of the use of the associated broken-syrometry bases in the random-phase approximation (RPA) are considered using soluble models-Evidence is presented in support of the conjecture that the success of these techniques lies in the fact that they mimic singularities in the dependence on interaction strengths of the exact solution.This conjecture provides a natural explanation for why such methods fail close to a point where a phase transition occurs and indicates possible directions for improvement.Phase diagrams at both zero and finite temperature are determined, and simple analytic expressions for the way in which critical scrcn;the scale with particle number are found.It is shown that the ''phase transitions" predicted at finite temperature are relevant.A connection between the singularities referred to above and real phase transitions found in the thermodynamic limit is discussed.It is found that only stable bases can be used in an RPA calculation.This is in particular true for those RPA modes which are not associated with the onset of instability of the basis; these modes do not describe any excited state when tht. basis is unstable.Outside transitional regions certain undesirable features of HFB are unearthed, notably that the HFB ground state energy is not necessarily an upper bound to the exact ground state energy.The effectiveness in this regime of the Hartree-Fock Seniority approximation as a substitute to projection methods is ■ -■■.ated.
The validity of the random-phase approximation (RPA) in broken-symmetry bases is tested in an appropriate many-body system for which exact solutions are available. Initially the regions of stability of the self-consistent quasiparticle bases in this system are established and depicted in a 'phase' diagram. It is found that only stable bases can be used in an RPA calculation. This is particularly true for those RPA modes which are not associated with the onset of instability of the basis; the authors see that these modes do not describe any excited state when the basis is unstable, although from a formal point of view they remain acceptable. The RPA does well in a stable broken-symmetry basis provided one is not too close to a point where a phase transition occurs. This is true for both energies and matrix elements.
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.
Finite-temperature mean-field theories, such as the Hartree--Fock (HF) and Hartree--Fock--Bogoliubov (HFB) theories, are formulated in the grand-canonical ensemble, and their applications to the calculation of statistical properties of nuclei such as level densities require a reduction to the canonical ensemble. In a previous publication [Y. Alhassid et al., Phys. Rev. C 93, 044320 (2016)], it was found that ensemble-reduction methods based on the saddle-point approximation are not reliable in cases in which rotational symmetry or particle-number conservation is broken. In particular, the calculated HFB canonical entropy can be unphysical as a result of the inherent violation of particle-number conservation. In this work, we derive a general formula for exact particle-number projection after variation in the HFB approximation, assuming that the HFB Hamiltonian preserves time-reversal symmetry. This formula reduces to simpler known expressions in the HF and Bardeen--Cooper--Schrieffer (BCS) limits of the HFB. We apply this formula to calculate the thermodynamic quantities needed for level densities in the heavy nuclei 162Dy,148Sm^{162}\mathrm{Dy}, ^{148}\mathrm{Sm}162Dy,148Sm, and 150Sm^{150}\mathrm{Sm}150Sm. We find that the exact particle-number projection gives better physical results and is significantly more computationally efficient than the saddle-point methods. However, the fundamental limitations caused by broken symmetries in the mean-field approximation are still present.
In the theoretical investigation of nonrelativistic feimion systems, several characteristic approximation schemes play a decisive role. Examples are the BCS theory of superconductivity, the Hartree-Fock method in atomic and molecular physics and its generalization by means of the Bogoliubov theory (containing also BCS as a special case) used in nuclear physics. Furthermore, the Random-Phase-Approximation (RPA) is of fundamental importance in plasma physics as well as in the explanation of the well known vibrational states of nuclei. In this connection, it should be pointed out that the socälled nuclear models, which to a certain extent brought nuclear physics into miscredit, represent in fact nothing else but a more or less intuitive substitute for special well defined approximation schemes: the introduction of an average potential in heavy nuclei stands for Hartree-Fock, whereas the so-called surface vibrations visualize RPA. In addition, the possibility to describe elementary excitations by the naive concept of independent particle motion is justified theoretically by the Bogoliubov transformation which leads to the so-called quasi-particles.
The Hartree-Fock approximation to the many-fermion problem can break exact symmetries, and in some cases by changing a parameter in the interaction one can drive the Hartree-Fock minimum from a symmetry-breaking state to a symmetry-conserving state (also referred to as a ``phase transition'' in the literature). The order of the transition is important when one applies the random-phase approximation (RPA) to the of the Hartree-Fock wave function: if first order, RPA is stable through the transition, but if second-order, then the RPA amplitudes become large and lead to unphysical results. The latter is known as ``collapse'' of the RPA. While the difference between first- and second-order transitions in the RPA was first pointed out by Thouless, we present for the first time nontrivial examples of both first- and second-order transitions in a uniform model, the interacting shell-model, where we can compare to exact numerical results.
For an infinite system of nucleons interacting through a central spin-isospin schematic force we discuss how the Hartree-Fock theory at finite temperature T yields back, in the T=0 limit, the standard zero-temperature Feynman theory when there is no symmetry breaking. The attention is focused on the mechanism of cancellation of the higher order Hartree-Fock diagrams and on the dependence of this cancellation upon the range of the interaction. When a symmetry breaking takes place it turns out that more iterations are required to reach the self-consistent Hartree-Fock solution, because the cancellation of the Hartree-Fock diagrams of order higher than one no longer occurs. We explore in particular the case of an explicit symmetry breaking induced by a constant, uniform magnetic field B acting on a system of neutrons. Here we compare calculations performed using either the single-particle Matsubara propagator or the zero-temperature polarization propagator, discussing under which perturbative scheme they lead to identical results (if B is not too large). We finally address the issue of the spontaneous symmetry breaking for a system of neutrons using the technique of the anomalous propagator: in this framework we recover the Stoner equation and the critical values of the interaction corresponding to a transition to a ferromagnetic phase.