Quantum field theories with a complex action suffer from a sign problem in stochastic nonperturbative treatments, making many systems of great interest – such as polarized or mass-imbalanced fermions and QCD at finite baryon density – extremely challenging to treat numerically. Another such system is that of bosons at finite angular momentum; experimentalists have successfully achieved vortex formation in supercooled bosonic atoms, and have measured quantities of interest such as the moment of inertia. However, the rotation results in a complex action, making the usual numerical treatments of the theory unusable. This thesis treats systems of nonrelativistic bosons with finite angular momentum using two approaches. One approach is to determine the virial coefficients using a semi-classical lattice approximation (SCLA). Through this approach, we are able to compute the thermodynamic equation of state of the bosons for finite trapping frequency, rotation, and inter-particle interaction. The second approach uses the complex Langevin (CL) method – a method which employs an extension of the Langevin equation to complex space and circumvents the sign problem to compute the full quantum behavior of a low energy system of interacting, trapped, and rotating bosons. We examine the density and angular momentum of the system using all three methods, but the CL method in principal allows us to compute properties unique to rotating superfluids, in particular to show the formation of density singularities (so-called vortex lattices) and compute the circulation of the fluid around those vortices. This work advances our understanding of the quantum effects of rotation on ultracold bosonic gases in two different limits.
Quantum field theories with a complex action suffer from a sign problem in stochastic nonperturbative treatments, making many systems of great interest – such as polarized or mass-imbalanced fermions and QCD at finite baryon density – extremely challenging to treat numerically. Another such system is that of bosons at finite angular momentum; experimentalists have successfully achieved vortex formation in supercooled bosonic atoms, and have measured quantities of interest such as the moment of inertia. However, the rotation results in a complex action, making the usual numerical treatments of the theory unusable. This thesis treats systems of nonrelativistic bosons with finite angular momentum using two approaches. One approach is to determine the virial coefficients using a semi-classical lattice approximation (SCLA). Through this approach, we are able to compute the thermodynamic equation of state of the bosons for finite trapping frequency, rotation, and inter-particle interaction. The second approach uses the complex Langevin (CL) method – a method which employs an extension of the Langevin equation to complex space and circumvents the sign problem to compute the full quantum behavior of a low energy system of interacting, trapped, and rotating bosons. We examine the density and angular momentum of the system using all three methods, but the CL method in principal allows us to compute properties unique to rotating superfluids, in particular to show the formation of density singularities (so-called vortex lattices) and compute the circulation of the fluid around those vortices. This work advances our understanding of the quantum effects of rotation on ultracold bosonic gases in two different limits.
Quantum field theories with a complex action suffer from a sign problem in stochastic nonperturbative treatments, making many systems of great interest – such as polarized or mass-imbalanced fermions and QCD at finite baryon density – extremely challenging to treat numerically. Another such system is that of bosons at finite angular momentum; experimentalists have successfully achieved vortex formation in ultracold bosonic atoms, and have measured quantities of interest such as density profiles and the moment of inertia. However, the treatment of superfluids requires the use of complex bosons, making the usual numerical methods unusable. In this work, we apply complex Langevin, a method that has gained much attention in lattice QCD, to the calculation of basic properties of interacting bosons at finite angular momentum. We show preliminary results for the angular momentum and moment of inertia and benchmark calculations in the noninteracting limit.
Quantum field theories with a complex action suffer from a sign problem in stochastic nonpertur-bative treatments, making many systems of great interest – such as polarized or mass-imbalanced fermions and QCD at finite baryon density – extremely challenging to treat numerically. Another such system is that of bosons at finite angular momentum; experimentalists have successfully achieved vortex formation in ultracold bosonic atoms, and have measured quantities of interest such as density profiles and the moment of inertia. However, the treatment of superfluids requires the use of complex bosons, making the usual numerical methods unusable. In this work, we apply complex Langevin, a method that has gained much attention in lattice QCD, to the calculation of basic properties of interacting bosons at finite angular momentum. We show preliminary results for the angular momentum and moment of inertia and benchmark calculations in the noninteracting limit.
In this thesis, we perform ab-initio lattice simulations of the nonrelativistic and relativistic Bose-Einstein condensates under strong external fields such as the electric field, the magnetic field, and the rotation.All the lattice actions discussed in this thesis are complex, so that the conventional Monte Carlo method su↵ers from the notorious sign problem.The path integral measure is complex due to the complex action, so that the important sampling algorithm cannot be applied.To overcome this di culty, we adopt the complex Langevin method, which has been developed in the context of finite density quantum chromodynamics to attack the fermion sign problem.In particular, we perform ab-initio simulation of the quantum vortex nucleation by the magnetic field or the rotation.In dilute and low temperature system, quantum and thermal fluctuations are negligible.The system can be remarkably well described by the mean field approximation.However, when quantum or thermal fluctuation becomes large, it is highly nontrivial how the quantized vortices behave.Around the critical values of temperature, chemical potential, magnetic field, or angular velocity, the fluctuation grows and the mean-field description inevitably breaks down.To understand the quantum vortex nucleation in such situations, the ab-initio simulation is necessary as discussed in this thesis.The direct evidence of the quantum vortex nucleation is the quantization of circulation.We show that the circulation is quantized in the superconducting (superfluid) phase far from the critical chemical potential, but it is not just above the critical chemical potential.We observe that the quantized circulation is blurred by the quantum fluctuation as the chemical potential is getting close to its critical value.In our simulation, the quantum fluctuation of vortex number is observed, while the averaged circulation is clearly quantized.At first glance, these two facts seem to be incompatible.However, we show that the fluctuation of vortex number behaves as Gaussian and, as a result of cancellation, the average circulation becomes exact integer.iii
Strongly coupled quantum matter displays a rich phenomenology including phase transitions and often unexpected collective behavior. Remarkable advances in experiments with ultracold Fermi gases allow us to gain deep insight into these intriguing systems. Their theoretical description, however, is often challenging as exact analytic solutions are available only in a few special cases, and approximate techniques such as mean-field or perturbation theory are of limited use. Numerical treatment with Monte Carlo (MC) methods has led to profound success in this regard. Unfortunately, for many systems - and especially for asymmetric quantum gases - the infamous sign problem slows progress due to an exponentially scaling of the computational effort with inceasing system size. In this thesis, we set out to explore the rich physics of two-component Fermi gases in the presence of finite spin polarization and/or mass imbalance. To surmount an arising sign problem, we learn from methodological advances made in the field of quantum chromodynamics and further develop these lattice approaches in the context of nonrelativistic Fermi gases. An extensive overview of the numerical methods is presented, including several toy problems to detail the capabilities and shortcomings of the developed approaches. With these tools in hand, we perform extensive benchmarks of the hybrid Monte Carlo method with imaginary asymmetries (iHMC) and the complex Langevin (CL) method, which is based on a complex version of stochastic quantization. Both approaches are shown to yield excellent results for the ground-state energy equation of state of mass-imbalanced Fermi gases in one spatial dimension. Due to its great versatility, the CL method is subsequently employed to study pairing in one-dimensional Fermi gases, for which suitable two-body correlations are computed, revealing unexpected pairing patterns for spin- and mass-imbalanced systems. Another major system of interest in this thesis is the paradigmatic unitary Fermi gas which is investigated at finite temperature and spin polarization. A precise determination of the density equation of state in the normal phase enables us to explore a broad range of thermodynamic properties. We infer valuable information on the finite-temperature phase diagram, such as a flat phase boundary of the normal-to-superfluid transition near the balanced limit and indications for the absence of an extensive pseudogap phase above this transition. The presented results provide experimentally testable ab initio predictions for a range of previously inaccessible thermodynamic quantities.
Two-component Fermi gases model the behavior of many systems in different fields of physics, and one of their interesting features is that they condense into superfluids at low temperatures. Ultracold atoms experiments represent one realization of such Fermi gases, and their great flexibility sparked active research into their phase structure. In the literature, there are studies of the phase structure using functional methods, mean-field approximations, and other approaches. In the present work, we aim to perform ab-initio Monte-Carlo simulations of the system to probe their phase structure for inhomogeneous phases in the presence of spin imbalance. Such simulations generally require a bosonization of the theoretical description of the system that rewrites the theory in terms of an auxiliary bosonic field. For this auxiliary field, many possible choices achieve this, and previous studies often use a field that corresponds to a density of fermions. In the present work, we develop a novel approach to this problem by bosonizing the system in terms of the so-called pairing field which corresponds to the superfluid order parameter. Even in the absence of mass- or spin-imbalance, this approach exhibits a sign problem that presents a problem to many Monte-Carlo methods. To circumvent this sign problem, we base our simulation on the Complex Langevin method. The central question of this thesis is if a simulation of a pairing-field-based formalism using the Complex-Langevin method is suitable to study the phase structure of two-component Fermi gases in the presence of spin imbalance. To this end, we develop a lattice theory based on the pairing field by discretizing the continuous Hamiltonian and performing a rigorous derivation of the path integral from there. We pay special attention to the derivation of lattice derivative operators and rescale the theory to be dimensionless. Beyond that, we develop an efficient notation for lattice theories that makes their handling arguably easier than that of continuum theories. With the obtained theory, we derive the Langevin equation for the system together with the expressions we need to sample observables and develop a numerical simulation on that basis. We use the simulation to study 0+1-dimensional systems as a proof-of-concept. Specifically, we calculate density equations of state and two-point functions for a range of dimensionless couplings and compare them to exact solutions. Additionally, we compare our obtained results for the two-point functions to general discussions of the analytic properties of correlation functions to gain additional insight into the qualitative and numerical behavior of our simulation. We found that our results for both density equations of state and two-point functions are in excellent agreement with the exact solutions. Going forward, we plan to study systems in d>0 spatial dimensions, beginning with simulations of 1+1-dimensional systems. In d=3 dimensions the pairing field's correspondence to the superfluid order parameter may allow us to efficiently study the spontaneous breaking of the U(1) symmetry of the system. On that basis, we can probe the phase diagram of the system for inhomogeneous phases at finite spin imbalance in future studies.
The calculation of the ground state and thermodynamics of mass-imbalanced Fermi systems is a challenging many-body problem. Even in one spatial dimension, analytic solutions are limited to special configurations and numerical progress with standard Monte Carlo approaches is hindered by the sign problem. The focus of the present work is on the further development of methods to study imbalanced systems in a fully nonperturbative fashion. We report our calculations of the ground-state energy of mass-imbalanced fermions using two different approaches which are also very popular in the context of the theory of the strong interaction (quantum chromodynamics, QCD): (a) the hybrid Monte Carlo algorithm with imaginary mass imbalance, followed by an analytic continuation to the real axis; and (b) the complex Langevin algorithm. We cover a range of on-site interaction strengths that includes strongly attractive as well as strongly repulsive cases which we verify with nonperturbative renormalization group methods and perturbation theory. Our findings indicate that, for strong repulsive couplings, the energy starts to flatten out, implying interesting consequences for short-range and high-frequency correlation functions. Overall, our results clearly indicate that the complex Langevin approach is very versatile and works very well for imbalanced Fermi gases with both attractive and repulsive interactions.