In this thesis ultracold quantum gases are studied with field theoretical methods. The quantum mechanical three-body problem is solved exactly and the recently experimentally observed universality of the three-body parameter is explained. By means of the functional renormalization group (fRG) the four-body problem is analyzed and it is shown that no additional four-body parameter has to be introduced. The second part of this thesis studies a single impurity immersed in a majority Fermi sea. We develop a new, numerical fRG technique which allows the computation of Green’s functions with full frequency and momentum dependence. Our results are in excellent agreement with recent experiments and exemplify the intricate interplay between few- and many-body physics in ultracold quantum gases.
In this thesis ultracold quantum gases are studied with field theoretical methods. The quantum mechanical three-body problem is solved exactly and the recently experimentally observed universality of the three-body parameter is explained. By means of the functional renormalization group (fRG) the four-body problem is analyzed and it is shown that no additional four-body parameter has to be introduced. The second part of this thesis studies a single impurity immersed in a majority Fermi sea. We develop a new, numerical fRG technique which allows the computation of Green’s functions with full frequency and momentum dependence. Our results are in excellent agreement with recent experiments and exemplify the intricate interplay between few- and many-body physics in ultracold quantum gases.
This thesis reports on experimental studies exploring few and many-body physics of ultracold \nBose and Fermi gases with reduced dimensionality. These experiments illustrate the versatility \nand great amount of control over the particle number, the interaction and other degrees of \nfreedom, like the spin, that these generic quantum systems offer. In the first part of this \nthesis, we use quasi one-dimensional few-particle systems of one to ten fermionic atoms to \ninvestigate the crossover from few to many-body physics. This is achieved by measuring the \ninteraction energy between a single impurity atom in a state |down> which repulsively interacts \nwith an increasing number of majority atoms in a state |up>. We find that the system quickly \napproaches the results from the many-body theory, which describes the behavior of a single \nimpurity immersed in a Fermi sea of an infinite number of majority particles. The second \npart of this thesis presents studies of the time evolution of a bosonic F=1 spinor BEC of 87Rb \natoms. In this system, we investigate the emergence and coarsening of ferromagnetic spin \ntextures from initially unmagnetized samples. While the ferromagnetic domains grow, we \nobserve the development of a spin space anisotropy which is in agreement with the predicted \nphase-diagram. The last part of this thesis presents our first steps towards the investigation \nof phase coherence of quasi two-dimensional quantum gases in the crossover from bosonic \nmolecules to fermionic atoms.
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.
In this thesis, cold gases as well as the electron gas are analyzed with two expansion techniques that have, in essence, the same aim: To describe parameter regimes where the few-body aspect dominates over the collective many-body behavior.The Operator Product Expansion (OPE) of quantum field theory is used to extract high-frequency properties of the correlation function that determines the radio-frequency (RF) response of a two-dimensional Fermi gas with zero-range interactions.Exact sum rules that relate the zeroth and first moment of the radio-frequency spectrum to the particle number and the contact of the gas, are derived from these properties.A quantum cluster (virial-) expansion is employed to study the properties of the spectral function of the two-dimensional Fermi gas at small to moderate degeneracy.From the spectral function, observables like the density of states and the momentum distribution are calculated and are found to be in excellent agreement with Tan's universal relations.In the second part of the thesis, the cluster expansion is applied to both bosonic and fermionic three-dimensional quantum gases.Virial coefficients, contacts and momentum distribution are calculated up to third order in the fugacity.This includes three-particle correlations exactly.The results are are in excellent agreement with known universal relations.In the third part of this thesis, an OPE is applied to the problem of the interacting electron gas in both two and three dimensions.A power-law decay of the momentum distribution and the static structure factor at high momenta is found, compatible with earlier findings by J. Kimball.
Universality is a crucial concept in modern physics, which allows us to describe phenomena without referring to microscopic details of systems.The unitary Fermi gas is a prime example, where universal relations among physical observables and a universal equation of state have been developed and studied in detail.In this thesis, we extend these notions beyond the paradigm of the unitary Fermi gas and investigate universal effects of few-body correlations in resonantly interacting ultracold atomic gases.In particular, we discuss (i) universal relations in a spinless Fermi gas with an anisotropic p-wave resonance and (ii) universality of the few-body spectra and the ground-state properties of an impurity-boson system.Firstly, we investigate the universal relations in a spinless Fermi gas with an anisotropic p-wave resonance.We show that the high-momentum distribution and the short-range density-density correlation have characteristic power laws, whose coefficients define the p-wave contact tensor.We derive the adiabatic sweep theorem, which relates the p-wave contact tensor to the total energy.We also discuss the experimental scheme to measure the p-wave contact tensor and test our results.Secondly, we examine the ground states and lower excited states of an impurity resonantly interacting with one, two, and three non-interacting bosons.We calculate the energy spectra of this few-body system with two different models.The overall scale of length depends on the models.However, we find that once we fix the three-body parameter, which is a critical scattering length of the ground-state Efimov trimer, the few-body spectrum is independent of a specific choice of the models.This finding is corroborated by comparing our numerical results with the one obtained by Ardila and Giorgini [Phys.Rev. A 92, 033612 (2015)].Thirdly, we investigate the case in which the mass of an impurity is infinite.In this limit, we show that the model of a Feshbach resonance can be mapped to a bosonic extension of Anderson's single impurity model, which can be used to analytically solve the three-body problem.We find that the ground-state energy with a Feshbach resonance is drastically different from that in a potential-interaction system, and that the former approaches the latter logarithmically as the unitarity limit is taken.We argue This thesis would not have been possible without the help and support of many people.I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor, Professor Masahito Ueda, for his guidance and sincere encouragement over the period of my PhD program.He was a great teacher; he taught me a lot of things, from the way of a good scientist to a key to happy married life.I would also like to thank my secondary supervisors, Professor Tetsuo Hatsuda and Professor Junji Yumoto, for valuable advice on my study, and sometimes on job hunting.They also organized meetings where I could learn studies of other students.Much of the work in this thesis started during my stay at Quantum Matter group in Monash University, where I greatly benefited from fruitful collaboration with the group members.I am deeply grateful to Professor Meera M. Parish
This thesis reports on experimental studies of few-body physics in ultracold Fermi gases. The main part is devoted to the first realisation of an ultracold three-component Fermi gas in thermal equilibrium that consists of atoms in the three lowest spin states of 6Li. In first experiments the collisional stability of the gas was investigated in dependence of the interparticle interaction. The interaction strength was tuned by an external magnetic field employing Feshbach resonances in all three two-body scattering channels. At two magnetic field values a resonant enhancement of three-body loss was observed that can be explained by an Efimov-like trimer consisting of one atom in each of the three states which crosses the continuum twice in the studied magnetic field region. The behaviour of three-body loss rates could be understood by taking into account a variation of the lifetime of the trimer with the magnetic field. These experiments were performed with large ensembles of atoms. A finite deeply degenerate Fermi gas consisting of a controlled number of atoms may serve as a clean model for finite Fermi systems as for example atomic nuclei. An approach for the preparation of such a gas is discussed and first experimental steps are presented.
Rapid progress in the field of ultracold atoms allows the study of many new and old models of quantum many-body physics. In this doctoral dissertation we theoretically explore exotic phases of ultracold quantum gases, with a special focus spin-imbalanced attractive Fermi gases in lower dimensional situations. Chapter 2 reviews the mean-field theory approach to pairing in twocomponent Fermi gases. Applications of this theory are illustrated in Chapter 3, where we discuss mostly well-known results of mean-field theory applied to imbalanced Fermi gases. Adapted from the author's prior publications, Chapters 4, 5 use the theory developed in Chapters 2, 3. In Chapter 6 we discuss the physics of Fermi gases, squeezed into one spatial dimension. In this and Chapter 7, we go beyond mean-field theory, approaching the problem through the Bethe ansatz, exact solutions to few-body problems and Fermi-Bose mappings ("fermionization"). We also show results from a joint effort with the experimental group of Randy Hulet at Rice University to experimentally realize and probe a strongly interacting one dimensional paired Fermi gas. In Chapter 8, after a brief introduction to rapidly rotating two dimensional Bose gases, we introduce a new protocol to create few atom fractional quantum Hall states. Finally, in Chapter 9 we study the effects of two-body losses on lattice Bose gases with hardcore interactions in one and two spatial dimensions.