No Arabic abstract
We calculate the renormalized effective 2-, 3-, and 4-body interactions for N neutral ultracold bosons in the ground state of an isotropic harmonic trap, assuming 2-body interactions modeled with the combination of a zero-range and energy-dependent pseudopotential. We work to third-order in the scattering length a defined at zero collision energy, which is necessary to obtain both the leading-order effective 4-body interaction and consistently include finite-range corrections for realistic 2-body interactions. The leading-order, effective 3- and 4-body interaction energies are U3 = -(0.85576...)(a/l)^2 + 2.7921(1)(a/l)^3 + O[(a/l)^4] and U4 = +(2.43317...)(a/l)^3 + O[(al)^4], where w and l are the harmonic oscillator frequency and length, respectively, and energies are in units of hbar*w. The one-standard deviation error 0.0001 for the third-order coefficient in U3 is due to numerical uncertainty in estimating a slowly converging sum; the other two coefficients are either analytically or numerically exact. The effective 3- and 4-body interactions can play an important role in the dynamics of tightly confined and strongly correlated systems. We also performed numerical simulations for a finite-range boson-boson potential, and it was comparison to the zero-range predictions which revealed that finite-range effects must be taken into account for a realistic third-order treatment. In particular, we show that the energy-dependent pseudopotential accurately captures, through third order, the finite-range physics, and in combination with the multi-body effective interactions gives excellent agreement with the numerical simulations, validating our theoretical analysis and predictions.
We show that there are effective three- and higher-body interactions generated by the two-body collisions of atoms confined in the lowest vibrational states of a 3D optical lattice. The collapse and revival dynamics of approximate coherent states loaded into a lattice are a particularly sensitive probe of these higher-body interactions; the visibility of interference fringes depend on both two-, three-, and higher-body energy scales, and these produce an initial dephasing that can help explain the surprisingly rapid decay of revivals seen in experiments. If inhomogeneities in the lattice system are sufficiently reduced, longer timescale partial and nearly full revivals will be visible. Using Feshbach resonances or control of the lattice potential it is possible to tune the effective higher-body interactions and simulate effective field theories in optical lattices.
We apply the framework of non-equilibrium quantum thermodynamics to the physics of quenched small-sized bosonic quantum gases in a one-dimensional harmonic trap. We show that dynamical orthogonality can occur in these few-body systems with strong interactions after a quench and we find its occurrence analytically for an infinitely repulsive pair of atoms. We further show this phenomena is related to the fundamental excitations that dictate the dynamics from the spectral function. We establish a clear qualitative link between the amount of (irreversible) work performed on the system and the establishment of entanglement. We extend our analysis to multipartite systems by examining the case of three trapped atoms. We show the initial (pre-quench) interactions play a vital role in determining the dynamical features, while the qualitative features of the two particle case appear to remain valid. Finally, we propose the use of the atomic density profile as a readily accessible indicator of the non-equilibrium properties of the systems in question.
Chemical reaction rates often depend strongly on stereodynamics, namely the orientation and movement of molecules in three-dimensional space. An ultracold molecular gas, with a temperature below 1 uK, provides a highly unusual regime for chemistry, where polar molecules can easily be oriented using an external electric field and where, moreover, the motion of two colliding molecules is strictly quantized. Recently, atom-exchange reactions were observed in a trapped ultracold gas of KRb molecules. In an external electric field, these exothermic and barrierless bimolecular reactions, KRb+KRb -> K2+Rb2, occur at a rate that rises steeply with increasing dipole moment. Here we show that the quantum stereodynamics of the ultracold collisions can be exploited to suppress the bimolecular chemical reaction rate by nearly two orders of magnitude. We use an optical lattice trap to confine the fermionic polar molecules in a quasi-two-dimensional, pancake-like geometry, with the dipoles oriented along the tight confinement direction. With the combination of sufficiently tight confinement and Fermi statistics of the molecules, two polar molecules can approach each other only in a side-by-side collision, where the chemical reaction rate is suppressed by the repulsive dipole-dipole interaction. We show that the suppression of the bimolecular reaction rate requires quantum-state control of both the internal and external degrees of freedom of the molecules. The suppression of chemical reactions for polar molecules in a quasi-two-dimensional trap opens the way for investigation of a dipolar molecular quantum gas. Because of the strong, long-range character of the dipole-dipole interactions, such a gas brings fundamentally new abilities to quantum-gas-based studies of strongly correlated many-body physics, where quantum phase transitions and new states of matter can emerge.
We introduce a model to study the collisions of two ultracold diatomic molecules in one dimension interacting via pairwise potentials. We present results for this system, and argue that it offers lessons for real molecular collisions in three dimensions. We analyze the distribution of the adiabatic potentials in the hyperspherical coordinate representation as well as the distribution of the four-body bound states in the adiabatic approximation (i.e. no coupling between adiabatic channels). It is found that while the adiabatic potential distribution transitions from chaotic to non-chaotic as the two molecules are separated, the four-body bound states show no visible chaos in the distribution of nearest-neighbor energy level spacing. We also study the effects of molecular properties, such as interaction strength, interaction range, and atomic mass, on the resonance density and degree of chaos in the adiabatic potentials. We numerically find that the dependence of the four-body bound state density on these parameters is captured by simple scaling laws, in agreement with previous analytic arguments, even though these arguments relied on uncontrolled approximations. This agreement suggests that similar scaling laws may also govern real molecular collisions in three dimensions.
We consider the fate of $1/N$ expansions in unstable many-body quantum systems, as realized by a quench across criticality, and show the emergence of ${rm e}^{2lambda t}/N$ as a renormalized parameter ruling the quantum-classical transition and accounting nonperturbatively for the local divergence rate $lambda$ of mean-field solutions. In terms of ${rm e}^{2lambda t}/N$, quasiclassical expansions of paradigmatic examples of criticality, like the self-trapping transition in an integrable Bose-Hubbard dimer and the generic instability of attractive bosonic systems toward soliton formation, are pushed to arbitrarily high orders. The agreement with numerical simulations supports the general nature of our results in the appropriately combined long-time $lambda tto infty$ quasiclassical $Nto infty$ regime, out of reach of expansions in the bare parameter $1/N$. For scrambling in many-body hyperbolic systems, our results provide formal grounds to a conjectured multiexponential form of out-of-time-ordered correlators.