Standard analytical construction of the many-body wave function of interacting particles in one dimension, beyond mean-field theory, is based on the Jastrow approach. The many-body interacting ground state is build up from the ground state of the non-interacting system and the product of solutions of the corresponding interacting two-body problem. However, this is possible only if the center-of-mass motion is decoupled from the mutual interactions. In our work, based on the general constraints given by contact nature of the atom-atom interactions, we present an alternative approach to the standard construction of the \textit{pair-correlation} wave-function. Within the proposed ansatz, we study the many-body properties of trapped bosons as well as fermionic mixtures and we compare these predictions with the exact diagonalization approach in a wide range of particle numbers, interaction strengths, and different trapping potentials.
Standard analytical construction of the many-body wave function of interacting particles in one dimension, beyond mean-field theory, is based on the Jastrow approach. The many-body interacting ground state is build up from the ground state of the non-interacting system and the product of solutions of the corresponding interacting two-body problem. However, this is possible only if the center-of-mass motion is decoupled from the mutual interactions. In our work, based on the general constraints given by contact nature of the atom-atom interactions, we present an alternative approach to the standard construction of the pair-correlation wave function. Within the proposed ansatz, we study the many-body properties of trapped bosons as well as fermionic mixtures and we compare these predictions with the exact diagonalization approach in a wide range of particle numbers, interaction strengths, and different trapping potentials.
We derive and describe a very accurate variational scheme for the ground state of the system of a few ultra-cold bosons confined in one-dimensional traps of arbitrary shapes. It is based on assumption that all inter-particle correlations have two-body nature. By construction, the proposed ansatz is exact in the noninteracting limit, exactly encodes boundary conditions forced by contact interactions, and gives full control on accuracy in the limit of infinite repulsions. We show its efficiency in a whole range of intermediate interactions for different external potentials. Our results manifest that for generic non-parabolic potentials mutual correlations forced by interactions cannot be captured by distance-dependent functions.
We derive and describe a very accurate variational scheme for the ground state of the system of a few ultra-cold bosons confined in one-dimensional traps of arbitrary shapes. It is based on assumption that all inter-particle correlations have two-body nature. By construction, the proposed ansatz is exact in the noninteracting limit, exactly encodes boundary conditions forced by contact interactions, and gives full control on accuracy in the limit of infinite repulsions. We show its efficiency in a whole range of intermediate interactions for different external potentials. Our results manifest that for generic non-parabolic potentials mutual correlations forced by interactions cannot be captured by distance-dependent functions.
We study a strongly attractive system of a few spin-(1/2) fermions confined in a one-dimensional harmonic trap, interacting via two-body contact potential. Performing exact diagonalization of the Hamiltonian we analyze the ground state and the thermal state of the system in terms of one- and two-particle reduced density matrices. We show how for strong attraction the correlated pairs emerge in the system. We find that the fraction of correlated pairs depends on temperature and we show that this dependence has universal properties analogous to the gap function known from the theory of superconductivity. In contrast to the standard approach based on the variational ansatz and/or perturbation theory, our predictions are exact and are valid also in a strong-attraction limit. Our findings contribute to the understanding of strongly correlated few-body systems and can be verified in current experiments on ultra-cold atoms.
Many useful properties of dilute Bose gases at ultra-low temperature are predicted precisely by the product-state ansatz, in which all particles are in the same quantum state. As particle-particle correlations become important, however, the product ansatz begins to fail. We consider a new set of states, which constitute a natural generalization of the product ansatz; the particle-correlated state of
N=l×n identical particles is derived by symmetrizing the
n-fold product of an
l-particle quantum state. The particle-correlated states can be simulated efficiently for large
N, because their parameter spaces, which depend on
l, do not grow with
n. Here we pay special attention to the pure-state case for
l=2, where the many-body state is constructed from a two-particle pure state. These paired wave functions for bosons, which we call pair-correlated states (PCS), were introduced by Leggett [Rev. Mod. Phys.
73, 307 (2001)] as a particle-number-conserving version of the Bogoliubov approximation. We present an iterative algorithm that solves the reduced (marginal) density matrices (RDMs)---these are the correlation functions---associated with PCS in time
O(N). The RDMs can also be derived from the normalization factor of PCS, which is derived analytically in the large
N limit. To test the efficacy of our theory, we analyze the ground state of the two-site Bose-Hubbard model by minimizing the energy of the PCS state, both in its exact form and in its large-
N approximate form. The relative errors of the ground state energy for both cases are within
10−5 for
N=1000 particles over the entire parameter region from a single condensate to a Mott insulator. Moreover, we present numerical results that suggest that PCS might be useful for describing the dynamics in the strongly interacting regime.
We use a BCS-type variational wave function to study attractively interacting quasi-one-dimensional fermionic atomic gases, motivated by cold-atom experiments that access the one-dimensional regime using an anisotropic harmonic trapping potential (with trapping frequencies ${\ensuremath{\omega}}_{x}={\ensuremath{\omega}}_{y}\ensuremath{\gg}{\ensuremath{\omega}}_{z}$) that confines the gas to a cigar-shaped geometry. To handle the presence of the trap along the
z direction, we construct our variational wave function from the harmonic oscillator Hermite functions, which are the eigenstates of the single-particle problem. Using an analytic determination of the effective interaction among harmonic oscillator states along with a numerical solution of the resulting variational equations, we make specific experimental predictions for how pairing correlations would be revealed in experimental probes, such as the local density and the momentum correlation function.