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arXiv:cond-mat/0303628 · Physical Review A

Quantum corrections to the dynamics of interacting bosons: Beyond the truncated Wigner approximation

Anatoli Polkovnikov

Published Nov 4, 2003• 132 citations
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Abstract

We develop a consistent perturbation theory in quantum fluctuations around the classical evolution of a system of interacting bosons. The zero-order approximation gives the classical Gross-Pitaevskii equations. In the next order we recover the truncated Wigner approximation, where the evolution is still classical but the initial conditions are distributed according to the Wigner transform of the initial density matrix. Further corrections can be characterized as quantum scattering events, which appear in the form of a nonlinear response of the observable to an infinitesimal displacement of the field along its classical evolution. At the end of the paper we give a few numerical examples to test the formalism.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.68.053604

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We develop a consistent perturbation theory in quantum fluctuations around the classical evolution of a system of interacting bosons. The zero-order approximation gives the classical Gross-Pitaevskii equations. In the next order we recover the truncated Wigner approximation, where the evolution is still classical but the initial conditions are distributed according to the Wigner transform of the initial density matrix. Further corrections can be characterized as quantum scattering events, which appear in the form of a nonlinear response of the observable to an infinitesimal displacement of the field along its classical evolution. At the end of the paper we give a few numerical examples to test the formalism.
We discuss a phase space representation of quantum dynamics of systems with many degrees of freedom. This representation is based on a perturbative expansion in quantum fluctuations around one of the classical limits. We explicitly analyze expansions around three such limits: (i) corpuscular or Newtonian limit in the coordinate-momentum representation, (ii) wave or Gross-Pitaevskii limit for interacting bosons in the coherent state representation, and (iii) Bloch limit for the spin systems. We discuss both the semiclassical (truncated Wigner) approximation and further quantum corrections appearing in the form of either stochastic quantum jumps along the classical trajectories or the nonlinear response to such jumps. We also discuss how quantum jumps naturally emerge in the analysis of non-equal time correlation functions. This representation of quantum dynamics is closely related to the phase space methods based on the Wigner-Weyl quantization and to the Keldysh technique. We show how such concepts as the Wigner function, Weyl symbol, Moyal product, Bopp operators, and others automatically emerge from the Feynmann's path integral representation of the evolution in the Heisenberg representation. We illustrate the applicability of this expansion with various examples mostly in the context of cold atom systems including sine-Gordon model, one- and two-dimensional Bose Hubbard model, Dicke model and others.
We study the truncated Wigner method applied to a weakly interacting spinless Bose-condensed gas which is perturbed away from thermal equilibrium by a time-dependent external potential. The principle of the method is to generate an ensemble of classical fields ψ( r ) which samples the Wigner quasi-distribution function of the initial thermal equilibrium density operator of the gas, and then to evolve each classical field with the Gross–Pitaevskii equation. In the first part of the paper we improve the sampling technique over our previous work (Sinatra et al 2000 J. Mod. Opt. 47 2629–44) and we test its accuracy against the exactly solvable model of the ideal Bose gas. In the second part of the paper we investigate the conditions of validity of the truncated Wigner method. For short evolution times it is known that the time-dependent Bogoliubov approximation is valid for almost pure condensates. The requirement that the truncated Wigner method reproduces the Bogoliubov prediction leads to the constraint that the number of field modes in the Wigner simulation must be smaller than the number of particles in the gas. For longer evolution times the nonlinear dynamics of the noncondensed modes of the field plays an important role. To demonstrate this we analyse the case of a three-dimensional spatially homogeneous Bose-condensed gas and we test the ability of the truncated Wigner method to correctly reproduce the Beliaev–Landau damping of an excitation of the condensate. We have identified the mechanism which limits the validity of the truncated Wigner method: the initial ensemble of classical fields, driven by the time-dependent Gross–Pitaevskii equation, thermalizes to a classical field distribution at a temperature T class which is larger than the initial temperature T of the quantum gas. When T class significantly exceeds T a spurious damping is observed in the Wigner simulation. This leads to the second validity condition for the truncated Wigner method, T class − T ≪ T , which requires that the maximum energy max of the Bogoliubov modes in the simulation does not exceed a few k B T .
Abstract We study the phase-space representation of dynamics of bosons in the semiclassical regime where the occupation number of the modes is large. To this end, we employ the van Vleck-Gutzwiller propagator to obtain an approximation for the Green’s function of the Wigner distribution. The semiclassical analysis incorporates interference of classical paths and reduces to the truncated Wigner approximation (TWA) when the interference is ignored. Furthermore, we identify the Ehrenfest time after which the TWA fails. As a case study, we consider a single-mode quantum nonlinear oscillator, which displays collapse and revival of observables. We analytically show that the interference of classical paths leads to revivals, an effect that is not reproduced by the TWA or a perturbative analysis.
We study the phase-space representation of dynamics of bosons in the semiclassical regime where the occupation number of the modes is large. To this end, we employ the van Vleck-Gutzwiller propagator to obtain an approximation for the Green's function of the Wigner distribution. The semiclassical analysis incorporates interference of classical paths and reduces to the truncated Wigner approximation (TWA) when the interference is ignored. Furthermore, we identify the Ehrenfest time after which the TWA fails. As a case study, we consider a single-mode quantum nonlinear oscillator, which displays collapse and revival of observables. We analytically show that the interference of classical paths leads to revivals, an effect that is not reproduced by the TWA or a perturbative analysis.
We consider the evolution of a gas of N bosons in the three-dimensional Gross–Pitaevskii regime (in which particles are initially trapped in a volume of order one and interact through a repulsive potential with scattering length of order 1/N ). We construct a quasi-free approximation of the many-body dynamics, whose distance to the solution of the Schrödinger equation converges to zero, as N \to \infty , in the L^{2} (\mathbb{R}^{3N}) -norm. To achieve this goal, we let the Bose–Einstein condensate evolve according to a time-dependent Gross–Pitaevskii equation. After factoring out the microscopic correlation structure, the evolution of the orthogonal excitations of the condensate is governed instead by a Bogoliubov dynamics, with a time-dependent generator quadratic in creation and annihilation operators. As an application, we show a central limit theorem for fluctuations of bounded observables around their expectation with respect to the Gross–Pitaevskii dynamics.
We demonstrate how the beyond-mean-field Lee-Huang-Yang (LHY) corrections and its related physics can be naturally incorporated into the representation of an ultracold Bose gas using the truncated Wigner approach without invoking effective energy terms or local density approximation. By generating a Bogoliubov ground-state representation with appropriately tailored bare interaction strength g0g_0g0​ and condensate density n0n_0n0​, the expected initial energy and densities are obtained while retaining access to quantum effects beyond the reach of the extended Gross-Pitaevskii equation (EGPE) formulation. This approach enables the study of correlations, coherence decay, single realisations, and the onset of quantum fluctuation effects with growing interaction strength. Numerical demonstrations for a weakly interacting single-component Bose gas show that observables deviate significantly from both the plain GPE and the EGPE incorporating LHY corrections. In regimes of strong interaction, many of the interference effects predicted by the GPE and EGPE are suppressed, and the EGPE offers no improvement over the plain GPE compared to the full Wigner model. In the weakly interaction limit, the EGPE appears accurate but resolving its deviation from mean-field results requires extensive ensemble averaging.