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Effective Theories in Few-Body Physics

Cory D. Schillaci

Published Jan 1, 2015• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

Effective theories are a controlled approach to making approximations in physics. We describe here work on two applications of effective theory techniques in few-body physics, specifically to nuclear and atomic systems.First, we analytically reduce the chiral three-nucleon interaction at NNLO to a density-dependent effective two-body potential by summing the third particle over the states of a spin-symmetric Fermi gas. Results are given for the potential in momentum space and in coordinate space, where the potential is seen to be nonlocal. An expansion of the potential in the difference of the nonlocal coordinates is made in order to arrive at a fully local effective two-body potential. We then explore the two-body spectra of spin-1/2 fermions in isotropic harmonic traps with external spin-orbit potentials and short range two-body interactions. Using a truncated basis of total angular momentum eigenstates, which is known to be equivalent to an effective theory when the atomic gas is harmonically confined, nonperturbative results are presented for experimentally realistic forms of the spin-orbit coupling: a pure Rashba coupling, Rashba and Dresselhaus couplings in equal parts, and a Weyl-type coupling. The technique is easily adapted to bosonic systems and other forms of spin-orbit coupling.

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Effective theories are a controlled approach to making approximations in physics. We describe here work on two applications of effective theory techniques in few-body physics, specifically to nuclear and atomic systems.First, we analytically reduce the chiral three-nucleon interaction at NNLO to a density-dependent effective two-body potential by summing the third particle over the states of a spin-symmetric Fermi gas. Results are given for the potential in momentum space and in coordinate space, where the potential is seen to be nonlocal. An expansion of the potential in the difference of the nonlocal coordinates is made in order to arrive at a fully local effective two-body potential. We then explore the two-body spectra of spin-1/2 fermions in isotropic harmonic traps with external spin-orbit potentials and short range two-body interactions. Using a truncated basis of total angular momentum eigenstates, which is known to be equivalent to an effective theory when the atomic gas is harmonically confined, nonperturbative results are presented for experimentally realistic forms of the spin-orbit coupling: a pure Rashba coupling, Rashba and Dresselhaus couplings in equal parts, and a Weyl-type coupling. The technique is easily adapted to bosonic systems and other forms of spin-orbit coupling.
Ultracold atomic systems have been of great theoretical and experimental interest in the past few decades.They provide ideal paradigms to study quantum phenomena, simulate condensed matter systems, and could potentially become a platform for quantum computations.This thesis focuses on the theoretical investigation of universal and non-universal properties of ultracold few-atom systems.The goal of this thesis is to answer or provide insights into several interesting open questions.First, what is the role of the non-universal three-body parameter in weakly-interacting harmonically trapped Bose gases and at which order does it kick in?Second, how large is the ground state energy of small two-component Fermi gases with infinitely strong interactions compared to their non-interacting counterparts?Lastly, what is the interplay between the spin-orbit coupling and the s-wave two-body interaction and how does it affect the energy spectrum of the two-atom system?In order to answer these questions, we develop and employ different analytical and numerical techniques.A perturbative effective field theory treatment to study the weaklyinteracting trapped Bose gas is employed.The treatment is extended to up to fourth-order perturbation theory and techniques to regularize the diverging sums are developed.A logarithmic divergence in the three-body sector is identified and the need for a non-universal three-body parameter is shown.v The explicitly correlated Gaussian method is used to calculate the ground state energy of small trapped two-component Fermi gases with up to ten particles.A code is developed from scratch and parallelized.An improved optimization scheme is developed.A novel technique to remove the finite-range dependence is proposed and tested.Our calculations serve as benchmarks for other numerical techniques.The explicitly correlated Gaussian method is extended to treat systems with periodic boundary conditions for the first time.Standard perturbation theory is used to treat the spin-orbit coupling term in trapped two-atom systems.Our treatment is based on the exact two-body zero-range solution in the trap.The interplay between the spin-orbit coupling and the two-body s-wave interaction is investigated and shown to have a great impact on the energy spectrum for certain parameter combinations.
We present a comprehensive derivation of a set of universal relations for spin-orbit-coupled Fermi gases in three or two dimensions, which follow from the short-range behavior of the two-body physics. Besides the adiabatic energy relations, the large-momentum distribution, the grand canonical potential, and pressure relation derived in our previous work for three-dimensional systems [Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 060408 (2018)], we further derive high-frequency tail of the radio-frequency spectroscopy and the short-range behavior of the pair correlation function. In addition, we also extend the derivation to two-dimensional systems with Rashba-type spin-orbit coupling. To simply demonstrate how the spin-orbit-coupling effect modifies the two-body short-range behavior, we solve the two-body problem in the sub-Hilbert space of zero center-of-mass momentum and zero total angular momentum, and we perturbatively take the spin-orbit-coupling effect into account at short distance, since the strength of the spin-orbit coupling should be much smaller than the corresponding scale of the finite range of interatomic interactions. The universal asymptotic forms of the two-body wave function at short distance are then derived, which are independent on the short-range details of interatomic potentials. We find that new scattering parameters emerge in the universal asymptotic forms, apart from the traditional sss- and ppp-wave scattering length (volume) and effective ranges. This is a general and unique feature for spin-orbit-coupled systems. We show how these two-body parameters characterize the universal relations in the presence of spin-orbit coupling. This work probably sheds light on understanding the profound properties of the many-body quantum systems in the presence of the spin-orbit coupling.
We explore the two-body spectra of spin-1/21/21/2 fermions in isotropic harmonic traps with external spin-orbit potentials and short-range two-body interactions. Using a truncated basis of total angular momentum eigenstates, nonperturbative results are presented for experimentally realistic forms of the spin-orbit coupling: a pure Rashba coupling, Rashba and Dresselhaus couplings in equal parts, and a Weyl-type coupling. The technique is easily adapted to bosonic systems and other forms of spin-orbit coupling.
We apply the general principles of effective field theories to the construction of effective interactions suitable for few- and many-body calculations in a no-core shell model framework. We calculate the spectrum of systems with three and four two-component fermions in a harmonic trap. In the unitary limit, we find that three-particle results are within 10% of known semianalytical values even in small model spaces. The method is very general, and can be readily extended to other regimes, more particles, different species (e.g., protons and neutrons in nuclear physics), or more-component fermions (as well as bosons). As an illustration, we present calculations of the lowest-energy three-fermion states away from the unitary limit and find a possible inversion of parity in the ground state in the limit of trap size large compared to the scattering length. Furthermore, we investigate the lowest positive-parity states for four fermions, although we are limited by the dimensions we can currently handle in this case.
Effective Field Theory (EFT) provides a powerful framework that exploits a separation of scales in physical systems to perform systematically improvable, model-independent calculations. Particularly interesting are few-body systems with short-range interactions and large two-body scattering length. Such systems display remarkable universal features. In systems with more than two particles, a three-body force with limit cycle behavior is required for consistent renormalization already at leading order. We will review this EFT and some of its applications in the physics of cold atoms and nuclear physics. In particular, we will discuss the possibility of an infrared limit cycle in QCD. Recent extensions of the EFT approach to the four-body system and N-boson droplets in two spatial dimensions will also be addressed.
A system of bosons in a two-dimensional harmonic trap in the presence of Rashba-type spin-orbit coupling is investigated. An analytic treatment of the ground state of a single atom in the weak-coupling regime is presented and used as a basis for a perturbation theory in the interacting two-boson system. The numerical diagonalization of both the single-particle and the two-boson Hamiltonian matrices allows us to go beyond those approximations and obtain not only the ground state, but also the low-energy spectra and the different energy contributions separately. We show that the expectation value of the spin-orbit term is related to the expectation value of ${\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{\ensuremath{\sigma}}}_{z}{\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{L}}_{z}$ for the eigenstates of the system, regardless of the trapping potential. The low-energy states of the repulsively interacting two-boson system are characterized. In the presence of a sufficiently strong interaction and spin-orbit coupling strength, there is a direct energy-level crossing in the ground state of the system between states of different Jz{J}_{z}Jz​, the third component of the total angular momentum, that changes its structure. This is reflected in a discontinuity in the different energy terms and it is signaled in the spatial density of the system.