The single-particle density matrix of a quantum bright soliton from the coordinate Bethe ansatz

Abstract

We present a novel approach for computing reduced density matrices for superpositions of eigenstates of a Bethe-ansatz solvable model by direct integration of the wave function in coordinate representation. A diagrammatic approach is developed to keep track of relevant terms and identify symmetries, which helps to reduce the number of terms that have to be evaluated numerically. As a first application we compute with modest numerical resources the single-particle density matrix and its eigenvalues including the condensate fraction for a quantum bright soliton with up to N = 10 bosons. The latter are constructed as superpositions of string-type Bethe-ansatz eigenstates of nonrelativistic bosons in one spatial dimension with attractive contact interaction. Upon delocalising the superposition in momentum space we find that the condensate fraction reaches maximum values larger than 97% with weak particle-number dependence in the range of particles studied. The presented approach is suitable for studying time-dependent problems and generalises to higher-order correlation functions.