Many physical systems can be described by one-dimensional (1D) models. It is the case of ultra-cold atoms: under certain circumstances their dynamics occurs only in one dimension. During my PhD I studied some aspects of 1D integrable systems. First, I present a study on the ground state of a system of 2-component repulsive fermions in 1D under harmonic confinement. I use the Bethe ansatz solution to calculate the phase diagram of the system in the homogeneous case. Adding a harmonic confinement I show that the atoms are distributed in a two-shell structure: the partially polarised phase in the inner shell and the fully polarised phase at the edges of the trap. Next I study the finite size effects for the gap of the quasiparticle excitation spectrum in the 1D Hubbard model. Two type of corrections to the result of the thermodynamic limit are obtained: a power law correction inversely proportional to the size of the system L, due to gapless excitations, and an exponential correction on L related to the existence of gapped excitations. In the weakly interacting regime this last correction can become important. Finally I study the response of a highly excited 1D gas to a periodic modulation of the coupling constant. I consider the Lieb-Liniger model and the non-integrable model of a single mobile impurity in a Fermi gas. I show that the non-integrable system is sensitive to excitations with frequencies as low as the mean level spacing, whereas the threshold frequency in the integrable case is much larger. This effect can be used as a probe of integrability for mesoscopic 1D systems, and can be observed experimentally by measuring the heating rate of a parametrically excited gas.
Many physical systems can be described by one-dimensional (1D) models. It is the case of ultra-cold atoms: under certain circumstances their dynamics occurs only in one dimension. During my PhD I studied some aspects of 1D integrable systems. First, I present a study on the ground state of a system of 2-component repulsive fermions in 1D under harmonic confinement. I use the Bethe ansatz solution to calculate the phase diagram of the system in the homogeneous case. Adding a harmonic confinement I show that the atoms are distributed in a two-shell structure: the partially polarised phase in the inner shell and the fully polarised phase at the edges of the trap. Next I study the finite size effects for the gap of the quasiparticle excitation spectrum in the 1D Hubbard model. Two type of corrections to the result of the thermodynamic limit are obtained: a power law correction inversely proportional to the size of the system L, due to gapless excitations, and an exponential correction on L related to the existence of gapped excitations. In the weakly interacting regime this last correction can become important. Finally I study the response of a highly excited 1D gas to a periodic modulation of the coupling constant. I consider the Lieb-Liniger model and the non-integrable model of a single mobile impurity in a Fermi gas. I show that the non-integrable system is sensitive to excitations with frequencies as low as the mean level spacing, whereas the threshold frequency in the integrable case is much larger. This effect can be used as a probe of integrability for mesoscopic 1D systems, and can be observed experimentally by measuring the heating rate of a parametrically excited gas.
Many physical systems can be described by one-dimensional (1D) models. It is the case of ultra-cold atoms: under certain circumstances their dynamics occurs only in one dimension. During my PhD I studied some aspects of 1D integrable systems. First, I present a study on the ground state of a system of 2-component repulsive fermions in 1D under harmonic confinement. I use the Bethe ansatz solution to calculate the phase diagram of the system in the homogeneous case. Adding a harmonic confinement I show that the atoms are distributed in a two-shell structure: the partially polarised phase in the inner shell and the fully polarised phase at the edges of the trap. Next I study the finite size effects for the gap of the quasiparticle excitation spectrum in the 1D Hubbard model. Two type of corrections to the result of the thermodynamic limit are obtained: a power law correction inversely proportional to the size of the system L, due to gapless excitations, and an exponential correction on L related to the existence of gapped excitations. In the weakly interacting regime this last correction can become important. Finally I study the response of a highly excited 1D gas to a periodic modulation of the coupling constant. I consider the Lieb-Liniger model and the non-integrable model of a single mobile impurity in a Fermi gas. I show that the non-integrable system is sensitive to excitations with frequencies as low as the mean level spacing, whereas the threshold frequency in the integrable case is much larger. This effect can be used as a probe of integrability for mesoscopic 1D systems, and can be observed experimentally by measuring the heating rate of a parametrically excited gas.
In this thesis we study the physics of quantum many-body systems confined to one-dimensional geometries. The work was motivated by the recent success of experimentalists in developing atom traps, capable of restricting the motion of the individual atoms to a single spatial dimension. Specifically, we look at aspects of the one-dimensional Bose gas including; excitation spectrum, correlation functions, and dynamical behaviour. In Chapter \ref{ch:excitation1D} we consider the Lieb-Liniger model of interacting bosons in one-dimension. We numerically solve the equations arising from the Bethe ansatz solution for the exact many-body wave function in a finite-size system of up to twenty particles for attractive interactions. We discuss novel features of the solutions, including deviations from the well-known string solutions due to finite size effects. We present excited state string solutions in the limit of strong interactions and discuss their physical interpretation, as well as the characteristics of the quantum phase transition that occurs as a function of interaction strength in the mean-field limit. Our results are compared to those obtained via exact diagonalization of the Hamiltonian in a truncated basis. In Chapter \ref{ch:g2} we analytically calculate the spatial nonlocal pair correlation function for an interacting uniform one dimensional Bose gas at finite temperature and propose an experimental method to measure nonlocal correlations. Our results span six different physical realms, including the weakly and strongly interacting regimes. We show explicitly that the characteristic correlation lengths are given by one of four length scales: the thermal de Broglie wavelength, the mean interparticle separation, the healing length, or the phase coherence length. In all regimes, we identify the profound role of interactions and find that under certain conditions the pair correlation may develop a global maximum at a finite interparticle separation due to the competition between repulsive interactions and thermal effects. In Chapter \ref{ch:casimirdrag} we study the drag force below the critical velocity for obstacles moving in a superfluid. The absence of drag is well established in the context of the mean-field Gross-Pitaevskii theory. We calculate the next order correction due to quantum and thermal fluctuations and find a non-zero force acting on a delta-function impurity moving through a quasi-one-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensate at all subcritical velocities and at all temperatures. The force occurs due to an imbalance in the Doppler shifts of reflected quantum fluctuations from either side of the impurity. Our calculation is based on a consistent extension of Bogoliubov theory to second order in the interaction strength, and finds new analytic solutions to the Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations for a gray soliton. In Chapter \ref{ch:solitons} we study the effect of quantum noise on the stability of a soliton. We find the soliton solutions exactly define the reflectionless potentials of the Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations. This results in complete stability of the solitons in a purely one dimensional system. We look at the modifications to the density profile of a black soliton due to quantum fluctuations.
This dissertation serves as a summary of my Ph.D. work numerically studying equilibrium and non-equilibrium properties of strongly-interacting one-dimensional (1D) boson systems. This work is motivated by the fact that 1D systems are realizable and highly controllable with ultracold atoms in optical lattice and atom chip experiments. We apply a recent worm algorithmic Monte Carlo approach developed for 1D continuous systems to study their equilibrium properties, both with and without an underlying lattice. We also apply an exact lattice approach based on the Bose-Fermi mapping to check our Monte Carlo results in the Tonks-Girardeau limit, and more importantly, to study far-from-equilibrium expansion dynamics of the systems.
We first study the scaling of one-particle correlations of the harmonically trapped Lieb-Liniger gas with changing temperature and interaction strength. Based on the universal behaviors of the density and momentum profiles, we are able to determine the effective parameters needed to fully characterize the system. We also find that the Tonks-Girardeau limit at low temperatures is the ideal regime for the experimental observation of the 1/k4 momentum tail.
An extra periodic lattice can drive the transition from superfluid to Mott insulator states. Exact and complete phase diagrams for such transitions are available only in the weak interacting and deep lattice limit, in which the system can be described using one-band Bose-Hubbard model. Beyond this limit, we use the worm algorithm in continuous space to map out the phase diagrams at various interaction strengths. We compare our phase diagrams with one-band Bose-Hubbard predictions and identify the regime where the one-band description breaks down. We introduce an inverse confined scattering solution to obtain effective Hubbard parameters, with which the Bose-Hubbard model provides correct results for strong interactions and deep lattices at unit filling.
In addition to the equilibrium properties, we also study the expansion dynamics of ultracold atoms in the hard-core limit. Experimentally, this is usually achieved by turning off confining potentials and letting atoms expand in optical lattices. Theoretical studies from initial ground states predicted the occurrence of fermionization of the momentum distribution after long expansion times. In addition, quasicondensation at finite momenta emerges when expanding from Mott insulating domains. Here, we develop a finite-temperature extension of the lattice approach for dynamics. We find the dynamical ferminoization of the momentum distributions at all temperatures. For expansion from initial Mott domains, we observe enhanced correlations reminiscent of dynamical quasicondensation. Surprisingly, we find the systems appear to cool down during the melting of the Mott domains. We use an emergent local Hamiltonian to understand these emergent phenomena.
We investigate the ground-state properties of trapped fermion systems described by the Hubbard model with an external confining potential. We discuss the universal behaviors of systems in different regimes: from few particles, i.e., in dilute regimes, to the trap thermodynamic limit. The asymptotic trap-size (TS) dependence in the dilute regime (increasing the trap size $\ensuremath{\ell}$ keeping the particle number N fixed) is described by a universal TS scaling controlled by the dilute fixed point associated with the metal-to-vacuum quantum transition. This scaling behavior is numerically checked by DMRG simulations of the one-dimensional (1D) Hubbard model. In particular, the particle density and its correlations show crossovers among different regimes: for strongly repulsive interactions they approach those of a spinless Fermi gas, for weak interactions those of a free Fermi gas, and for strongly attractive interactions they match those of a gas of hard-core bosonic molecules. The large-N limit keeping the ratio $N/\ensuremath{\ell}$ fixed corresponds to a 1D trap thermodynamic limit. We address issues related to the accuracy of the local density approximation (LDA). We show that the particle density approaches its LDA in the large-$\ensuremath{\ell}$ limit. When the trapped system is in the metallic phase, corrections at finite $\ensuremath{\ell}$ are $O({\ensuremath{\ell}}^{\ensuremath{-}1})$ and oscillating around the center of the trap. They become significantly larger at the boundary of the fermion cloud, where they get suppressed as $O({\ensuremath{\ell}}^{\ensuremath{-}1/3})$ only. This anomalous behavior arises from the nontrivial scaling at the metal-to-vacuum transition occurring at the boundaries of the fermion cloud.
This article briefly reviews recent theoretical developments in quantum critical phenomena in one-dimensional (1D) integrable quantum gases of cold atoms. We present a discussion on quantum phase transitions, universal thermodynamics, scaling functions and correlations for a few prototypical exactly solved models, such as the Lieb–Liniger Bose gas, the spin-1 Bose gas with antiferromagnetic spin-spin interaction, the two-component interacting Fermi gas as well as spin-3/2 Fermi gases. We demonstrate that their corresponding Bethe ansatz solutions provide a precise way to understand quantum many-body physics, such as quantum criticality, Luttinger liquids (LLs), the Wilson ratio, Tan's Contact, etc. These theoretical developments give rise to a physical perspective using integrability for uncovering experimentally testable phenomena in systems of interacting bosonic and fermonic ultracold atoms confined to 1D.
Fermions in one dimension are vastly different from their higher-dimension counterparts. At the same time, many theoretical models in one dimension have the luxury of being integrable and exactly solvable, which makes them excellent test beds for quantum simulation. In using these test beds, we can understand and improve on the techniques of quantum simulation so that we move towards solving difficult problems that cannot be solved using other methods due to the sheer complexity of these systems. In this work, we prepare one-dimensional fermions using cold atom techniques and probe low-energy excitations in such systems. We do so using the technique of Bragg spectroscopy, which enables us to probe the dynamical structure factor of the system directly, which in turn tells us about the density-density and spin-density correlations in the system. Utilizing the extreme tunability of cold atom experiments, we can study different regimes of these 1D Fermi gases. In particular, moving on from our previous investigations in the repulsive interactions, we investigate the attractive interaction side, where the attraction of the fermions causes bound states to form. The binding energy of these bound states causes a gap in the spin excitation, a hallmark of a new class of model: Luther-Emery liquid. We investigate weakly attractive Fermi gases close to the Luther-Emery limit and observe an inversion of the spin-charge separation hierarchy compared to the repulsive side, confirming expectations from exact Bethe ansatz solutions for the homogeneous gas at zero temperature, in which weakly bound fermion pairs are predicted. The result presented here provides insight into physics in one dimension, an important realm that is well known to host many exciting physics and exotic phases.