The correlation energy of the homogeneous three-dimensional interacting electron gas is calculated using the variational and fixed-node diffusion Monte Carlo methods, with trial functions that include backflow and three-body correlations. In the high-density regime
(rs< 5) the effects of backflow dominate over those due to three-body correlations, but the relative importance of the latter increases as the density decreases. Since the backflow correlations vary the nodes of the trial function, this leads to improved energies in the fixed-node diffusion Monte Carlo calculations. The effects are comparable to those found for the two-dimensional electron gas, leading to much improved variational energies and fixed-node diffusion energies similar to the released-node energies of Ceperley and Alder.
We present recent results from a diffusion Monte Carlo study of small 3 He drops in the limit of zero temperature. Using the same methodology than in previous calculations carried out for bulk 3 He , we have obtained accurate results for their energy and structure properties. A relevant concern of this analysis has been the determination of the stability threshold for self binding. Our results show that the smallest self-bound drop is formed by N = 30 atoms, with preferred orbitals for open shells corresponding to maximum value of the spin. The quality of the upper bound energies provided by the fixed node approximation is analyzed by performing released-node estimations for short released times. Possible improvements of the nodal surface by including BCS-like correlation functions are also discussed.
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 examine the thermodynamics of a two-dimensional Fermi gas model describing adsorbed
3Hein a thin superfluid
4Hefilm. The
3Hesystem is characterized by both a hydrodynamic effective mass and a set of discrete transverse single-particle states that model the effects of the interaction with the substrate that supports the film. We show that the magnetization steps seen in experiment are a simple manifestation of the
T=0K equation of state. We prove that perfectly horizontal magnetization steps rigorously disappear at any finite temperature. We show that the thermal stability of the steps is determined by the larger of $\ensuremath{\Delta}\ensuremath{\epsilon}/2,$ one-half of the level spacing, and ${\ensuremath{\mu}}_{m}{\mathcal{H}}_{0},$ the magnetic energy. We derive the conditions under which there exist points in the phase space (termed invariant points) through which all low-temperature isotherms pass exponentially close. The invariant points appear for magnetization versus
3Hecoverage, chemical potential versus magnetization, magnetic susceptibility versus coverage, and speed of sound squared versus coverage. We compare our calculated invariant points for the magnetization versus coverage with experiment and find good agreement. We show that there exist small regions of thermodynamic phase space in which the temperature derivative of the pressure is negative. We explain these anomalous regions as the result of
3Heatoms ``spilling over'' from a full Fermi sea to an empty Fermi sea upon the application of a small increase in temperature. Through a Maxwell relation, this behavior can also be seen as in the appearance of a local peak in low-temperature entropy isotherms versus coverage. In the limit of a two state model, we calculate the specific heat and show that a Schottky peak develops in the low
3Hecoverage limit. We calculate the magnetic susceptibility and predict that it should exhibit a steplike structure versus
3Hecoverage similar to that of the magnetization. We calculate the speed of sound and show that it should exhibit zero-temperature discontinuities at the points where new Fermi seas begin to be occupied. Both the steplike structure in the magnetic susceptibility and the discontinuity-type structure in the speed of sound persist to temperatures on the order of 100 mK, and are analyzed in terms of invariant points in their respective phase diagrams. We show explicitly that, in the Fermi gas limit, the zero-field magnetic susceptibility is simply proportional to the isothermal compressibility.
The equation of state of a weakly interacting two-dimensional Bose gas is studied at zero temperature by means of quantum Monte Carlo methods. Going down to as low densities as $n{a}^{2}\ensuremath{\propto}{10}^{\ensuremath{-}100}$ permits us to obtain agreement on beyond mean-field level between predictions of perturbative methods and direct many-body numerical simulation, thus providing an answer to the fundamental question of the equation of state of a two-dimensional dilute Bose gas in the universal regime (i.e., entirely described by the gas parameter
na2). We also show that the measure of the frequency of a breathing collective oscillation in a trap at very low densities can be used to test the universal equation of state of a two-dimensional Bose gas.