He cluster by removing the attractive tail in the interaction between some of the atoms in the system with the diffusion quantum Monte Carlo simulation. The ground-state energy, kinetic energy, cluster size, and density profile of the cluster are evaluated against the percentage of the atoms without the attractive tail. The condition for the cluster to lose its ability to form a quantum liquid droplet at zero temperature is found and analyzed. The cluster is no longer able to form a quantum liquid droplet when about two-thirds of pairs of attractive interaction are removed. The findings are helpful to the current studies on the formation of quantum liquid droplets from cold atoms.
He cluster by removing the attractive tail in the interaction between some of the atoms in the system with the diffusion quantum Monte Carlo simulation. The ground-state energy, kinetic energy, cluster size, and density profile of the cluster are evaluated against the percentage of the atoms without the attractive tail. The condition for the cluster to lose its ability to form a quantum liquid droplet at zero temperature is found and analyzed. The cluster is no longer able to form a quantum liquid droplet when about two-thirds of pairs of attractive interaction are removed. The findings are helpful to the current studies on the formation of quantum liquid droplets from cold atoms.
Small helium (4He) clusters containing the lighter isotope He3 are studied by means of quantum Monte Carlo methods. Accurate ground state energies and structural properties are obtained using accurate trial wave functions and the Tang–Tonnies–Yiu (TTY) helium–helium pair potential. The dimer He4–3He is not bound; as well as the trimer He4He23. The smallest cluster containing He3 is He24He3 with a nonrigid structure having a marked linear contribution. Interestingly, this weakly bound system, with an energy one order of magnitude less than the He34 trimer, is able to bind another He3 atom, forming the tetramer He24He23, which shows the odd feature of having five out of six unbound pairs. In general, the substitution of a single He4 atom in a pure cluster with a He3 atom leads to an energetic destabilization, as the pair He4–3He is not bound. The isotopic impurity is found to perturb only weakly the distributions of the remaining He4 atoms, which retain the high floppiness already found in the pure clusters. As the number of atoms increases the isotopic impurity has the marked tendency to stay on the surface of the cluster. This behavior is consistent with the formation of the so-called “Andreev states” of a single He3 in liquid He4 helium and droplets, where the impurity tends to form single-particle states on the surface of the pure He4.
For the past 30 years, helium nano-droplets have been of particular interest to experimentalists.Indeed, this is a cold dense finite liquid environment which is an excellent matrix forspectroscopy applications, in atomic and molecular collision physics as well as in ultra coldchemistry with ability of isolating interesting reactions intermediates like HOCO in OH + CO→ CO2 + H or to synthesize new materials as metallic nano-wires. These phenomena areconsequences of the quantum collective behaviour of helium atoms at temperature T < 1 Kwhich classify helium nano-droplets as quantum liquids. In this thesis work we propose tomodel photo-dissociation [1] of immersed diatomic as molecular iodine, doping and rotationalexcitation of these droplets by using an home-made molecular dynamics developed by Pr.Marius Lewerenz, the CLUSTER code. To take the quantum nature of helium atoms intoaccount the methodology exploits the quantum effective potential technique [2] at experimentalwork temperature 0.37 K.With the photo-dissociation, an excitation above a molecular fragmentation limit leads to twopossible scenarios depending one the amortised energy by the helium droplets. The first one isthe fast recombination so-called ’cage effect’ [3] and the second is where photo-fragmentsreside in the helium bath. But with nano-meter scale of droplets a third scenario is possible withfragments leaving the cluster surrounded by a helium solvating shell. Results are shown forhelium nano-droplets containing thousands atoms (2500 to 9000 He) and statistics on size andvelocity of I@Hen photo-fragments have been computed and are similar to experimentaloutcomes for analogous system CH3I [4].According experiments using 1 fs X-ray flashes [5], the helium nano-droplets are geoids whichis a clue indicating a rotation on itself as the Earth. Our code can set precise angular momentumin order to study the pattern of distortion from fission to multiple splitting. To evaluate thenumbers of sub-cluster a Complete Clustering algorithm based on graph theory has beenprogrammed exhibiting a linear complexity.To conclude a study of xenon doping is presented where the recombination dynamics unveils ametastable state called Atkins’ snowball [6] and different patterns of aggregation as nano-crystals and nano-wires well known by experimentalists
Superfluid helium nanodroplets are used to cool ions and form ion-neutral clusters at a temperature of 0.37 K. A desolvation technique was developed that allowed for the study of captured ions by mass spectrometry. From the mass spectrometry results it was determined that helium droplets may successfully capture sodium cations with kinetic energy of ~200 eV. Clusters of the neutral molecules H2O, N2, and HCN with Na+ were observed. Based on binding strength considerations, it is argued that the desolvation process imparts little energy into the ion-neutral clusters, avoiding dissociation. This result leads to the conclusion that ion-neutral clusters are formed within the droplet prior to desolvation, indicating that the helium snowball that is assumed to form around Na+ does not prevent ion-neutral cluster formation. This conclusion is supported by ab initio calculations, the results of which indicate the presence of barrierless pathways for neutral molecule insertion into the helium snowball surrounding Na+. The process of ion capture by helium droplets was studied by comparison of measured ion-doped droplet size distributions to known pre-ion capture droplet size distributions. The measured ion-doped droplet size distributions were affected by nozzle temperature, ion kinetic energy, and ion mass. These factors primarily affect two parameters of the ion-doped droplet size distribution, the minimum droplet size threshold, Nthr, and the droplet size at maximum signal intensity, Nmax. The effects of the studied factors on the measured distributions cannot be explained in terms of currently accepted droplet cooling mechanisms. Analysis of the results suggests that droplet doping efficiency can be improved in several ways, including a higher flux of lower-energy ions. An apparatus for the production and focusing of alkali cations at high fluxes and low energies is described. This apparatus was able to produce higher ion currents at lower kinetic energies than previous ion sources.
Quantum droplets are small clusters of atoms self-bound by the balance of attractive and repulsive forces. Here, we report on the observation of droplets solely stabilized by contact interactions in a mixture of two Bose-Einstein condensates. We demonstrate that they are several orders of magnitude more dilute than liquid helium by directly measuring their size and density via in situ imaging. We show that the droplets are stablized against collapse by quantum fluctuations and that they require a minimum atom number to be stable. Below that number, quantum pressure drives a liquid-to-gas transition that we map out as a function of interaction strength. These ultradilute isotropic liquids remain weakly interacting and constitute an ideal platform to benchmark quantum many-body theories.
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.
We have studied the stability of mixed 3He/4He clusters in L=0 states by the diffusion Monte Carlo method, employing the Tang-Toennies-Yiu He-He potential. The clusters 3He4HeN and 3He24HeN are stable for N>1. The lighter atoms tend to move to the surface of the cluster. The minimum number of 4He atoms able to bind three 3He atoms in a L=0 state is nine. Two of three fermionic helium atoms stay on the surface, while the third one penetrates into the cluster.