We use the functional renormalisation group to study the spectrum of three- and four-body states in bosonic systems around the unitary limit. Our effective action includes all energy-independent contact interactions in the four-atom sector and we int
roduce a running trimer field to eliminate couplings that involve the atom-atom-dimer channel. The results show qualitatively similar behaviour to those from exact approaches. The truncated action we use leads to overbinding of the two four-body states seen in those treatments. It also generates a third state, although only for a very narrow range of two-body scattering lengths.
We propose a new power counting for the effective field theory describing a near-threshold state with unstable constituents, such as the X(3872) meson. In this counting, the momenta of the heavy particles, the pion mass and the excitation energy of t
he unstable constituent -- the D* in the case of the X -- are treated as small scales, of order Q. The difference, delta, between the excitation energy of the D* and the pion mass is smaller than either by a factor ~20. We therefore assign delta an order Q^2 in our counting. This provides a consistent framework for a double expansion in both delta/m_pi and the ratio of m_pi to the high-energy scales in this system. It ensures that amplitudes have the correct behaviour at the three-body threshold. It allows us to derive, within an effective theory, various results which have previously been obtained using physically-motivated approximations.
We apply a functional renormalisation group to systems of four bosonic atoms close to the unitary limit. We work with a local effective action that includes a dynamical trimer field and we use this field to eliminate structures that do not correspond
to the Faddeev-Yakubovsky equations. In the physical limit, we find three four-body bound states below the shallowest three-body state. The values of the scattering lengths at which two of these states become bound are in good agreement with exact solutions of the four-body equations and experimental observations. The third state is extremely shallow. During the evolution we find an infinite number of four-body states based on each three-body state which follow a double-exponential pattern in the running scale. None of the four-body states shows any evidence of dependence on a four-body parameter.
Distorted-wave methods are used to remove the effects of one- and two-pion exchange up to order Q^3 from the empirical 1P1 phase shift. The one divergence that arises can be renormalised using an order-Q^2 counterterm which is provided by the (Weinbe
rg) power counting appropriate to the effective field theory for this channel. The residual interaction is used to estimate the scale of the underlying physics.
