This thesis investigates two topics: ultracold atomic collisions in a radio-frequency field and universal properties of a degenerate unitary Bose gas. One interesting point of the unitary Bose gas is that the system has only one length scale, that is, the average interparticle distance. This single parameter determines all properties of the gas, which is called the universality of the system. We first introduce a renormalized contact interaction to extend the validity of the zero-range interaction to large scattering lengths. Then this renormalized interaction is applied to many-body theories to determined those universal relations of the system. From the few-body perspective, we discuss the scattering between atoms in a single-color radio-frequency field. Our motivation is proposing the radio-frequency field as an effective tool to control interactions between cold atoms. Such a technique may be useful in future experiments such as creating phase transitions in spinor condensates. We also discuss the formation of ultracold molecules using radio-freqency fields from a time-dependent approach.
This thesis investigates two topics: ultracold atomic collisions in a radio-frequency field and universal properties of a degenerate unitary Bose gas. One interesting point of the unitary Bose gas is that the system has only one length scale, that is, the average interparticle distance. This single parameter determines all properties of the gas, which is called the universality of the system. We first introduce a renormalized contact interaction to extend the validity of the zero-range interaction to large scattering lengths. Then this renormalized interaction is applied to many-body theories to determined those universal relations of the system. From the few-body perspective, we discuss the scattering between atoms in a single-color radio-frequency field. Our motivation is proposing the radio-frequency field as an effective tool to control interactions between cold atoms. Such a technique may be useful in future experiments such as creating phase transitions in spinor condensates. We also discuss the formation of ultracold molecules using radio-freqency fields from a time-dependent approach.
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 study ultracold gases of alkali-metal atoms in the quantum degenerate regime. The interatomic interactions in these type of systems can be tuned using resonances induced by magnetic or electric fields. The tunability of the interactions, together with the possibility of confining the atoms with several kinds of external potentials, allows for a completely novel approach to study basic problems in many-body physics, and moreover, allows to enter regimes which have never been accessible in condensed matter or nuclear physics. For example, this has led to the experimental demonstration of an intimate relation between two types of superfluidity: the crossover from Bose-Einstein condensation of tightly bound molecules to the superfluid behavior related to weakly bound BCS-like pairs. Another experimental landmark was reached when the existence of universal Efimov three-body bound states was proven in experiments with ultracold bosonic cesium atoms. In this thesis, we study several aspects of these strongly interacting and ultracold atomic gases. We develop an analytical model that encapsulates all of the relevant scattering physics in atomic systems where open-channel shape resonances and closedchannel Feshbach resonances give rise to complicated and non-trivial scattering properties. This model provides lots of physical insight and is shown to describe important quantities, such as the molecular energies and scattering phase shifts, with a high level of accuracy. The model is compared to full numerical coupled-channel calculations in two atomic systems: rubidium and lithium. We study the BCS-BEC crossover using a many-body description of the ultracold gas that includes the non-trivial energy dependence of the scattering model. We show that it gives rise to superfluid behavior associated with the formation of BCS-like pairs while the low-energy interactions are repulsive in character. The energy dependence of the interactions is crucial, as it gives rise to attractive interactions at the Fermi energy, necessary for the formation of Cooper pairs. We demonstrate new ways of controlling the interatomic interactions using a combination of magnetic and electric fields. This leads to experimental control of, for instance, the three-body parameter in the context of Efimov physics and of non-universal behavior in the BCS-BEC crossover in fermionic gases. Using a four-body method based on first principles, we solve the molecule-molecule scattering problem to calculate several important properties of bosonic and fermionic Summary 145 molecules that consist of light and heavy atoms. These type of molecules are of current experimental interest, and we predict several exciting relations between three- and four-body observables in these type of systems.
The research described in this thesis is part of an international effort with the aim of studying ultracold quantum degenerate gas samples like Bose-Einstein condensates and Fermi degenerate systems, consisting of atoms confined in magnetic or optical traps. The behavior of such samples is governed by the inter-atomic interactions and the resulting properties of the atom-atom scattering. At the relevant temperatures of 1nK to 10µK a key property is the atom-atom scattering length a. In chapter 2 a theoretical method is presented which enables one to describe the interaction and scattering of (ultra)cold atoms to unprecedented precision. It is also unparalleled in comprehensiveness: it allows the prediction of a large and varied set of experimental data for all isotopes of the same element. The method relies on the extraction from experiments of a few (phase) parameters which completely summarize the behavior of the atoms in the (ultra)cold regime. In chapter 3 the method is applied to the "workhorses" of cold-atom physics: the atomic species 85Rb and 87Rb. We extract the foregoing parameters to a very high precision from several recent high precision experiments, allowing us to predict e.g. the 87Rb spinor condensate to be ferromagnetic: a prediction for which the scattering length has to be calculated with a precision better than 1%. We also predict Feshbach resonances at experimentally accessible magnetic field strengths; resonances searched for and found by the experimental group of Rempe. In close collaboration with his group we "fine-tune" the interaction parameters found previously, by making use of only one of the observed resonances. We then obtain agreement with 42 out of the observed 43 resonance field strengths and are able to identify bound states inducing the Feshbach resonances at these locations. Chapter 4 describes the results of this research. With a thorough understanding of the rubidium interactions, we then switch to lithium which has a fermionic (6Li) and a bosonic (7Li) isotope. Both are being used in cold-atom experiments. In chapter 5 we evaluate the interaction parameters for lithium allowing us to predict magnetic field strengths for which a sample of fermionic 6Li atoms can be regarded as strongly interacting. Furthermore, a three-level method for measuring mean-field shifts, based on radio-frequency techniques, is introduced. For weak interactions we find proportionality of resonance shifts to interaction strengths. In the strongly interacting regime, however, these shifts become very small reflecting the quantum unitarity limit and many-body effects. Most interesting is the fact that in this regime the shifts are small both for large positive a and for large negative a, likely reflecting the universality of the interaction energy. In chapters 6 and 7 the interactions between lithium atoms are reinvestigated, making use of newly available experimental data and with the updated interaction parameters special attention is paid to locating field strengths at which magnetically tunable Feshbach resonances occur in the scattering of lithium atoms. In chapter 6 scattering events in a gas of (fermionic) 6Li atoms are studied. In chapter 7 we show that a consistent description of the 6Li+6Li system can be given. We discuss theoretical uncertainties for the position of the wide 6Li Feshbach resonance and present an analytic scattering model for this resonance, based on the inclusion of a field-dependent virtual open-channel state. We predict new Feshbach resonances for the 6Li-7Li system, and their importance for different types of crossover superfluidity models is discussed. Molecules created by magnetically sweeping over these resonances will have a fermionic character. One magnetic field strength is predicted at which two different fermionic molecules can be created simultaneously.
A dilute Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) near a Feshbach resonance provides experimental physics with a clean and controllable system to investigate strongly interacting many-body systems. The ability to tune the scattering length allows BECs to be projected onto strong interactions from an initial weakly interacting state. However, historically, studying a bulk 3D strongly interacting BEC has been diffcult, as these systems are inherently unstable due to three-body inelastic collisions. Thus, 2D, 1D, lattice confined, and two component Fermi gases were used to explore the strong interactions in an ultracold gas. In this thesis, I present the first measurement of a strongly interacting 3D 85Rb BEC. I introduce our experimental system and the techniques we used to probe the BEC. I first report on probes of a BEC in the weakly interacting regime. To probe a spherical 85Rb BEC with strong interactions we implemented a novel experimental technique that allowed us to quickly change the interactions, bypassing inelastic losses. We projected the BEC onto unitarity, where the scattering length diverges and the interactions are infinite, in order to observe dynamics and the unexpectedly long lifetime of the gas. Additionally, we observe a universality of the gas with respect to the length scale set by the interparticle spacing.
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
In this dissertation, we study the few-body ultracold Bose-Fermi mixture and quasi-1D scattering at ultracold temperature. Degenerate quantum gases have attracted enormous attentions during the past two decades. They have opened new platforms of quantum simulation, precision measurement and quantum chemistry. The scattering properties of degenerate quantum gases are the first things to study in order to gain insight into various novel phenomena at ultracold temperatures.\nTo address the role of quantum statistics at ultracold temperature, we study the spectrum and dynamics of a few-body Bose-Fermi mixtures. In particular, we focus the dynamical evolution of a few-body Bose-Fermi mixture and concentrate on its universal behavior at large inter-particle scattering length. We predict the molecule formation efficiency in many-body Bose-Fermi mixtures by mapping this critical observable in few-body calculations. We also propose that a the quantum beat experiment could be used to measure the energy of the lowest Efimov trimer at unitarity.\nTo address the role of dimensionality, we study confinement induced resonances and similar phenomena in general transverse confining potentials. Well-separated energy scales in different dimensions allow the creation of reduced dimensional systems at ultracold temperatures. We develop a general framework to regularize the low-energy quasi-1D scattering phase shift associated with a zero range interaction.\nLastly, we discuss future prospects for the study of an ultracold Bose-Fermi mixture, and scattering in reduced dimensional systems of a more general topology.