No Arabic abstract
In many-body systems governed by pairwise contact interactions, a wide range of observables is linked by a single parameter, the two-body contact, which quantifies two-particle correlations. This profound insight has transformed our understanding of strongly interacting Fermi gases. Here, using Ramsey interferometry, we study coherent evolution of the resonantly interacting Bose gas, and show that it cannot be explained by only pairwise correlations. Our experiments reveal the crucial role of three-body correlations arising from Efimov physics, and provide a direct measurement of the associated three-body contact.
Using Boltzmanns equation, we study the effect of three-body losses on the momentum distribution of a homogeneous unitary Bose gas in the dilute limit where quantum correlations are negligible. We calculate the momentum distribution of the gas and show that inelastic collisions are quantitatively as important as a second order virial correction.
We study the dilute and ultracold unitary Bose gas, which is characterized by a universal equation of state due to the diverging s-wave scattering length, under a transverse harmonic confinement. From the hydrodynamic equations of superfluids we derive an effective one-dimensional nonpolynomial Schrodinger equation (1D NPSE) for the axial dynamics which, however, takes also into account the transverse dynamics. Finally, by solving the 1D NPSE we obtain meaningful analytical formulas for the dark (gray and black) solitons of the bosonic system.
When the binding energy of a two-body system goes to zero the two-body system shows a continuous scaling invariance governed by the large value of the scattering length. In the case of three identical bosons, the three-body system in the same limit shows the Efimov effect and the scale invariance is broken to a discrete scale invariance. As the number of bosons increases correlations appear between the binding energy of the few- and many-body systems. We discuss some of them as the relation between the saturation properties of the infinite system and the low-energy properties of the few-boson system.
We predict the existence of a dip below unity in the second-order coherence function of a partially condensed ideal Bose gas in harmonic confinement, signaling the anticorrelation of density fluctuations in the sample. The dip in the second-order coherence function is revealed in a canonical-ensemble calculation, corresponding to a system with fixed total number of particles. In a grand-canonical ensemble description, this dip is obscured by the occupation-number fluctuation catastrophe of the ideal Bose gas. The anticorrelation is most pronounced in highly anisotropic trap geometries containing small particle numbers. We explain the fundamental physical mechanism which underlies this phenomenon, and its relevance to experiments on interacting Bose gases.
We study the stability of a thermal $^{39}$K Bose gas across a broad Feshbach resonance, focusing on the unitary regime, where the scattering length $a$ exceeds the thermal wavelength $lambda$. We measure the general scaling laws relating the particle-loss and heating rates to the temperature, scattering length, and atom number. Both at unitarity and for positive $a ll lambda$ we find agreement with three-body theory. However, for $a<0$ and away from unitarity, we observe significant four-body decay. At unitarity, the three-body loss coefficient, $L_3 propto lambda^4$, is three times lower than the universal theoretical upper bound. This reduction is a consequence of species-specific Efimov physics and makes $^{39}$K particularly promising for studies of many-body physics in a unitary Bose gas.