Helium systems at zero temperature are strongly correlated neutral systems which can only be described by means of quantum mechanics. The existence of the two isotopes 4He and 3He allows the comparison between the quantum effects due to different statistics, bosonic and fermionic. In this Thesis, an analysis of Helium droplets has been done. Throughout this work, both energetic and structural properties of systems with different number of particles N are obtained by means of the Quantum Monte Carlo techniques (Variational and Diffusion Monte Carlo - VMC and DMC-).
Several studies on Helium droplets have been published in the last years, most of them using the mean field theory (as the Density Functional) and variational approaches (as VMC). In the case of 4He, also exact DMC results have already been reported, actually, a great number of works have described with high accuracy the ground state of this bosonic system. The appearance of magic numbers from experimental point of view has motivated the study of 4He droplets, and one chapter of this Thesis is focused on this bosonic system. We have carried out a one-by-one energetic study in the range from 20 to 30 particles using the DMC technique to discuss the existence of magic numbers. On the other hand, a brief study about vortices is also done; using out code, one can calculate the energy of a droplet with one vortex inside (EV) and, therefore, the energy of a vortex (EV -E0).
About 3He droplets, the sign problem makes their study quite more difficult, for this reason, the number of works is considerably smaller than in the bosonic case. One aim of this thesis was to write a DMC code using both Fixed and Released Node approximations (FN and RN) able to perform high accurate calculations of energetic and structural properties of these finite fermionic systems.
Helium systems at zero temperature are strongly correlated neutral systems which can only be described by means of quantum mechanics. The existence of the two isotopes 4He and 3He allows the comparison between the quantum effects due to different statistics, bosonic and fermionic. In this Thesis, an analysis of Helium droplets has been done. Throughout this work, both energetic and structural properties of systems with different number of particles N are obtained by means of the Quantum Monte Carlo techniques (Variational and Diffusion Monte Carlo - VMC and DMC-).
Several studies on Helium droplets have been published in the last years, most of them using the mean field theory (as the Density Functional) and variational approaches (as VMC). In the case of 4He, also exact DMC results have already been reported, actually, a great number of works have described with high accuracy the ground state of this bosonic system. The appearance of magic numbers from experimental point of view has motivated the study of 4He droplets, and one chapter of this Thesis is focused on this bosonic system. We have carried out a one-by-one energetic study in the range from 20 to 30 particles using the DMC technique to discuss the existence of magic numbers. On the other hand, a brief study about vortices is also done; using out code, one can calculate the energy of a droplet with one vortex inside (EV) and, therefore, the energy of a vortex (EV -E0).
About 3He droplets, the sign problem makes their study quite more difficult, for this reason, the number of works is considerably smaller than in the bosonic case. One aim of this thesis was to write a DMC code using both Fixed and Released Node approximations (FN and RN) able to perform high accurate calculations of energetic and structural properties of these finite fermionic systems.
Introduction In Chapters 1 to 4 we studied methods for solving the Schrödinger equation for many-electron systems. Many of the techniques described there carry over to other quantum many-particle systems, such as liquid helium, and the protons and neutrons in a nucleus. The techniques which we discussed there were, however, all of a mean-field type and therefore correlation effects could not be taken into account without introducing approximations. In this chapter, we consider more accurate techniques, which are similar to those studied in Chapter 10 and are based on using (pseudo-)random numbers – hence the name ‘Monte Carlo’ for these methods. In Chapter 10 we applied Monte Carlo techniques to classical many-particle systems; here we use these techniques for studying quantum problems involving many particles. In the next section we shall see how we can apply Monte Carlo techniques to the problem of calculating the quantum mechanical expectation value of the ground state energy. This is used in order to optimise this expectation value by adjusting a trial wave function in a variational type of approach, hence the name variational Monte Carlo (VMC). In the following section we use the similarity between the Schrödinger equation and the diffusion equation in order to calculate the properties of a collection of interacting quantum mechanical particles by simulating a classical particle diffusion process. The resulting method is called diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC).
Below Tλ = 2.17 K, bulk 4He is a superfluid and has a non-zero Bose-Einstein condensate fraction. This work will focus primarily on how phenomena such as superfluidity, Bose condensation and superfluid vortices are manifested in microscopic, inhomogeneous helium systems. Path Integral Monte Carlo is a powerful method for calculating the equilibrium properties of quantum systems at finite temperature. We have achieved linear scaling of computer time with number of particles through the use of neighbor lists, allowing us to simulate systems of several thousand atoms. We have derived a local superfluid estimator and used it to examine the microscopic superfluid response around a molecule rotating in a helium nanodroplet. We found that the first solvation layer is well-described by a two dimensional superfluid, with thermal excitations occuring at a lower temperature than in bulk helium. The effective moment of inertia of a linear impurity in a helium droplet is calculated, and compared with experimental scattering results. In addition, we calculated the vortex formation energy for both pure droplets and droplets doped with linear impurities, and found that the linear impurities had a negligible impact on the formation energy. A possible spectroscopic signature of vortices in doped helium droplets was suggested. After deriving a local estimator, we calculated the condensate fraction throughout the free helium surface of a semi-infinite slab. These results, along with densitydensity correlation functions, were used to characterize the surface excitations and calculate the extent to which ripplons are present. In addition, the ripplon dispersion relation was calculated using imaginary-time correlation functions, and found to be lll in good agreement with experimental results. Finally, we have calculated the Dey be-Waller factor in solid helium for a range of temperatures and densities, and compared the scaling behavior with the predictions of harmonic theory. The first non-Gaussian contribution to the density distribution was calculated.
We report accurate ground state energies and structural properties for small clusters of 4He computed with the diffusion quantum Monte Carlo (DMC) method combined with high quality trial wave functions and using the recent analytical pair potential of Tang, Toennies, and Yiu [Phys. Rev. Lett. 74, 1546 (1995)]. Calculations based on the older HFD-B(He) potential are reported for comparison. The clusters are found to be extremely floppy and to be characterized by very diffuse wave functions. The DMC results for 4He2 and 4He3 are in excellent agreement with other calculations using conventional methods. 4He3 is found to have a noticeable contribution from nearly linear geometries. The internal structure of the clusters is described by a three particle correlation function which reveals a significantly non-spherical internal cluster structure. The energies for all cluster sizes are found to be slightly higher than those obtained with the HFD-B(He) pair potential. Exploratory calculations on the helium trimer indicate that the effects of three body interactions do not exceed the uncertainty margin provided by different state of the art pair potentials.
We study systems of particles with varying numbers of distinguishable species ranging from 4-species to the N-species limit, where N is the number of particles in the system itself. We examine these systems using various powerful simulation techniques that belong to the quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) family. The N-species limit is studied via Path Integral Monte Carlo (PIMC), which is a finite temperature, non-perturbative technique. At this limit, we explore the viability of two different thermal density matrices for systems that interact via hard-sphere, hard-cavity potentials. We then study the impact of finite-size effects on calculations of the energy, pressure and specific heat of the system when reaching the thermodynamic limit under periodic boundary conditions. We then move to studying a 4-species fermionic system using Variational Monte Carlo (VMC) and Diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC), which are ground state techniques. We apply these methods to the clustering problem of 4-particle and 8-particle systems. While the 4-particle, 4-species system is relatively simple to calculate as it is physically identical to a bosonic system of 4-particles, the 8-particle fermi system is more complicated. We detail the process of simulating a bound 8-particle state with respect to decay into two independent 4-particle clusters with DMC for the first time.
We present in this work the study of small (4)He(N)-Cs(2)((3)Σ(u)) aggregates (2 ≤ N ≤ 30) through combined variational, diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC), and path integral Monte Carlo (PIMC) calculations. The full surface is modeled as an addition of He-Cs(2) interactions and He-He potentials. Given the negligible strength and large range of the He-Cs(2) interaction as compared with the one for He-He, a propensity of the helium atoms to pack themselves together, leaving outside the molecular dopant is to be expected. DMC calculations determine the onset of helium gathering at N = 3. To analyze energetic and structural properties as a function of N, PIMC calculations with no bosonic exchange, i.e., Boltzmann statistics, at low temperatures are carried out. At T = 0.1 K, although acceptable one-particle He-Cs(2) distributions are obtained, two-particle He-He distributions are not well described, indicating that the proper symmetry should be taken into account. PIMC distributions at T = 1 K already compare well with DMC ones and show minor exchange effects, although binding energies are still far from having converged in terms of the number of quantum beads. As N increases, the He-He PIMC pair correlation function shows a clear tendency to coincide with the experimental boson-liquid helium one at that temperature. It supports the picture of a helium droplet which carries the molecular impurity on its surface, as found earlier for other triplet dimers.
The object of study of this thesis are dipolar systems in the quantum degenerate regime. In general, dealing with many-body systems and evaluating their properties requires to deal with the the Schrödinger equation. In the present study we employ different Monte Carlo methods that allow to find numerical solutions to it by employing a set of stochastic techniques. The simplest one that we introduce corresponds to the Variational Monte Carlo (VMC) method, that despite its simplicity, allows to obtain variational solutions to the many-body problem. A more accurate description is provided by Diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC), that provides exact solutions for the ground state of the system when dealing with bosons. We continue presenting two methods that rely on the Feynman's path integral formalism of quantum mechanics: Path Integral Monte Carlo (PIMC) and Path Integral Ground State (PIGS), that provide exact solutions for the bosonic problem at finite and zero temperature respectively. In order to work with fermionic systems, as we do in chapter 4 of this thesis, the DMC algorithm has to be modified with the Fixed-Node (FN) approximation, what alows to avoid the sign problem. Doing so, the results obtained with DMC correspond to variational upper bounds to the energy. In chapter 3 we study the superfluid properties of a system of dipolar bosons that are fully polarized and in which the atoms are restricted to move in the plane. We also consider that all the dipolar moments form a certain tilting angle with the axis perpendicular to the plane, what allows to introduce anisotropy in the system. The phase diagram at zero temperature of this system reveals the existence of three different phases: gas, stripe and solid. Here we focus on the characterization of the superfluid properties across that phase diagram. Our calculations allow to address the question of whether the stripe phase of this system could be a candidate for the supersolid, a system that simultaneously exhibit spatial long-range order and superfluidity. By the employment of DMC and PIGS, we report finite supefluid and condensate fractions, both in the gas and the stripe phases. Then, the study is completed by performing finite temperature calculations, where the use of PIMC allows to characterize the BKT transition and to report the critical temperature at which it occurs in the different phases. Finally, by direct comparison with the predictions of the Luttinger Liquid theory, we explicitly show that the stripe phase can not be described as an ensemble of 1D isolated systems. In chapter 4, we study the fermionic dipolar system in two dimensions, focusing in the case in which all dipoles are polarized along the direction, that in this case is chosen to be the one perpendicular to the plane containing their movement. We compute the equation of state of the system in a wide range of interaction parameters. In the low density regime, the comparison of our results for the dipolar model with those of a hard-disks one allows to determine the regime of universality. On the other hand, at higher densities ( and before crystallization), we discuss the issue of itinerant ferromagnetism, that is, the possibility of having a polarized phase as the ground state of the system. The repulsive Fermi polaron with dipolar interaction, that corresponds to the limit of ultralow concentration of impurities embebed in a fermionic bath is also studied. Here we determine the regime of universality for this problem and compute observables that allow to discuss the validity of the quasi-particle picture. In the last part of the thesis, the formation of ultra-dilute dipolar droplets is studied. Our results are in agreement with experimental measurements performed with dysprosium atoms. On the other hand, the evaluation of their differences with the prediction of the extended Gross-Pitaevskii equation makes it possible to determine the limits of the mean-field approach to this problem. El objeto de estudio de esta tesis son los sistemas dipolares en el régimen cuántico degenardo. Usualmente, tratar con sistemas de muchos cuerpos y para evaluar sus propiedades requiere ser capaz de resolver la ecuación de Schrödinger. En el presente estudio, empleamos diferentes métodos de Monte Carlo, que permiten encontrar soluciones numéricas de forma estocásticas. La primera y más simple de estas técnicas es el método Variational Monte Carlo (VMC), que da una solución variacional. Una mejora sobre lo anterior consiste en emplear el método Diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC) que permite obtener soluciones exactas para el estado fundamental del sistema (cuando se estudian sistemas bosónicos). Continuamos presentando dos métodos que se basan en el formalismo Feynman de la mecánica cuántica: Path Integral Monte Carlo (PIMC) y Path Integral Ground State (PIGS), que proporcionan soluciones exactas para el problema bosónico a temperatura finita y en el límite de temperatura cero respectivamente. Para trabajar con sistemas fermionicos, como es el caso del capítulo 4 de esta tesis, el algoritmo DMC tiene que ser modificado según la prescripción Fixed-Node para evitar el problema del signo. Al hacerlo, los resultados obtenidos con DMC se corresponden a soluciones variacionales a la energía. En el capítulo 3 estudiamos las propiedades superfluidas de un sistema de bosones dipolares completamente polarizados y en el que el movimiento de los dipolos está restringido al plano. También consideramos que los momentos dipolares forman un cierto ángulo con el eje perpendicular al plano, lo que permite introducir anisotropía en el sistema. El diagrama de fases a temperatura cero de este sistema revela la existencia de tres fases diferentes: gas, stripe y sólido. Aquí nos centramos en la caracterización de las propiedades superfluidas en ese diagrama de fases. Nuestros cálculos permiten abordar la cuestión de si la fase stripe de este sistema podría ser un candidato para el supersólido: un sistema en el que dos simetrías U (1) se rompen simultáneamente, permitiendo al sistema exhibir orden espacial de largo alcance y a la vez ser superfluido. Mediante el empleo de DMC y PIGS, evaluamos la fracción superfluída y el condensado, tanto en las fases de gas como en el stripe. Este estudio se completa con la extensión a temperatura finita, donde el uso de PIMC permite caracterizar la transición superfluida y obtener la temperatura crítica a la que ésta ocurre en las fases gas y stripe. Finalmente, por comparación directa con las predicciones Líquido de Luttinger, mostramos explícitamente que la fase de stripe no puede describirse como un conjunto de sistemas 1D aislados. En el capítulo 4, estudiamos el sistema dipolar fermiónico en dos dimensiones, enfocándonos en el caso en que todos los dipolos están polarizados a lo largo de la dirección que es perpendicular al plano que contiene su movimiento. Calculamos la ecuación de estado del sistema en un amplio rango de parámetros de interacción: a baja densidad, la comparación de nuestro modelo dipolar con uno de discos duros permite determinar el régimen de universalidad, mientras que a densidades más altas (antes de la cristalización), discutimos la posibilidad de una fase polarizada como el estado fundamental del sistema (ferromagnetismo itinerante). El polaron fermiónico dipolar, correspondiente al límite de impurezas ultradiluídas en un baño fermiónico también es estudiado, determinando el régimen de universalidad y los límites de validez de la aproximación de quasi-partícula. En la última parte de la tesis, la formación de gotas dipolares ultradiluídas es estudiada. Nuestros resultados están en acuerdo con medidas experimentales con átomos de disprosio. Por otro lado, la evaluación de las diferencias entre éstos y la predicción dada por la ecuación de Gross-Pitaevskii extendida, permite evaluar los límites de la aproximación