On a family of finitely many point interaction Hamiltonians free of ultraviolet pathologies

Abstract

Abstract We re-investigate the entire family of many center point interaction Hamiltonians. Under the assumption of exchange symmetry with respect to the point positions, we show that a large sub-family of point interaction Hamiltonian operators does not become either singular or trivial when the positions of two or more scattering centers tend to coincide. In this sense, they appear to be renormalized by default as opposed to the point interaction Hamiltonians usually considered in the literature. Functions in their domains satisfy regularized boundary conditions which turn out to be very similar to the ones proposed recently in many-body quantum mechanics to define three-particle system Hamiltonians with contact interactions bounded from below. In the two-center case, we study the behavior of the negative eigenvalues as a function of the center distance. The result is used to analyze a formal Born–Oppenheimer approximation of a three-particle system with two heavy bosons and one light particle. We demonstrate that this simplified model describes a stable system (no ‘fall to the center’ problem is present). Furthermore, in the unitary limit, the energy spectrum is characterized by an infinite sequence of negative energy eigenvalues accumulating at zero according to the geometrical Efimov law.