Three-body interactions in many-body effective field theory

Corinne Beckers, Jacques Tempere, Jeff Maki +1 more

Effective field theories (EFTs) are widely used to study many-body systems by describing two-body interactions using zero-ranged contact potentials. However, when extended to three-body processes, these contact interactions lead to divergences due to the absence of an intrinsic length scale. In EFT, this is typically resolved by introducing a zero-ranged three-body interaction, which can be renormalized to make the low-energy physics independent of the short-distance physics. However, when the two-body potential has a finite range, such as in separable potentials, there is no need for such renormalization. In this work, we derive the integral equation for the three-body scattering amplitude for separable potentials, and solve it in the strongly-interacting regime. With our model, we retrieve the known analytic form of the scattering amplitude for inelastic scattering processes and formulate a new scaling law for elastic three-body scattering processes.

R. Machleidt

Philippe A. Martin, FRANÇOIS ROTHEN

Manpreet Singh, Tapan Mishra

We investigate a system of dipolar bosons in an optical lattice with local two- and three-body interactions. Using the mean-field-theory approach, we obtain the ground-state phase diagram of the extended Bose-Hubbard model with both repulsive and attractive three-body interactions. We show that the additional three-body on-site interaction has strong effects on the phase diagram, especially on the supersolid phase. Positive values of the three-body interaction lead to the enhancement of the gapped phases at densities larger than unity by reducing the supersolid region. However, a small attractive three-body interaction enhances the supersolid phase.

Manuel Valiente

I consider nonrelativistic bosons interacting via pairwise potentials with infinite scattering length and supporting no two-body bound states. To lowest order in effective field theory, these conditions lead to noninteracting bosons, since the coupling constant of the Lieb-Liniger model vanishes identically in this limit. Since any realistic pairwise interaction is not a mere delta function, the noninteracting picture is an idealization indicating that the effect of interactions is weaker than in the case of off-resonant potentials. I show that the leading-order correction to the ground-state energy for more than two bosons is accurately described by the lowest-order three-body force in effective field theory that arises due to the off-shell structure of the two-body interaction. For natural two-body interactions with a short-distance repulsive core and an attractive tail, the emergent three-body interaction is repulsive and, therefore, three bosons do not form any bound states. This situation is analogous to the two-dimensional repulsive Bose gas, when treated using the lowest-order contact interaction, where the scattering amplitude exhibits an unphysical Landau pole. The avoidance of this state in the three-boson problem proceeds in a way that parallels the two-dimensional case. These results pave the way for the experimental realization of one-dimensional Bose gases with pure three-body interactions using ultracold atoms.

Philippe A. Martin, FRANÇOIS ROTHEN