Efimov physics in heteronuclear four-body systems

We study three- and four-body Efimov physics in a heteronuclear atomic system with three identical heavy bosonic atoms and one light atom. We show that exchange of the light atom between the heavy atoms leads to both three- and four-body features in the low-energy inelastic rate constants that trace to the Efimov effect. Further, the effective interaction generated by this exchange can provide an additional mechanism for control in ultracold experiments. Finally, we find that there is no true four-body Efimov effect - that is, no infinite number of four-body states in the absence of two- and three-body bound states - resolving a decades-long controversy.

A Test of a New Interacting N-Body Wave Function

The resources required to solve the general interacting quantum N-body problem scale exponentially with N, making the solution of this problem very difficult when N is large. In a previous series of papers we develop an approach for a fully-interacting wave function with a general two-body interaction which tames the N-scaling by developing a perturbation series that is order-by-order invariant under a point group isomorphic with S_N . Group theory and graphical techniques are then used to solve for the wave function exactly and analytically at each order. Recently this formalism has been used to obtain the first-order, fully-interacting wave function for a system of harmonically-confined bosons interacting harmonically. In this paper, we report the first application of this N-body wave function to a system of N fully-interacting bosons in three dimensions. We determine the density profile for a confined system of harmonically-interacting bosons. Choosing this simple interaction is not necessary or even advantageous for our method, however this choice allows a direct comparison of our exact results through first order with exact results obtained in an independent solution. Our density profile through first-order in three dimensions is indistinguishable from the first-order exact result obtained independently and shows strong convergence to the exact result to all orders.

A Complete Basis for a Perturbation Expansion of the General N-Body Problem

We discuss a basis set developed to calculate perturbation coefficients in an expansion of the general N-body problem. This basis has two advantages. First, the basis is complete order-by-order for the perturbation series. Second, the number of independent basis tensors spanning the space for a given order does not scale with N, the number of particles, despite the generality of the problem. At first order, the number of basis tensors is 23 for all N although the problem at first order scales as N^6. The perturbation series is expanded in inverse powers of the spatial dimension. This results in a maximally symmetric configuration at lowest order which has a point group isomorphic with the symmetric group, S_N. The resulting perturbation series is order-by-order invariant under the N! operations of the S_N point group which is responsible for the slower than exponential growth of the basis. In this paper, we perform the first test of this formalism including the completeness of the basis through first order by comparing to an exactly solvable fully-interacting problem of N particles with a two-body harmonic interaction potential.