Full Many-body Research Articles

Spreading of a local excitation in a quantum hierarchical model

We study the dynamics of the quantum Dyson hierarchical model in its paramagnetic phase. An initial state made by a local excitation of the paramagnetic ground state is considered. We provide analytical predictions for its time evolution, solving the single-particle dynamics on a hierarchical network. A localization mechanism is found and the excitation remains close to its initial position at arbitrary times. Furthermore, a universal scaling among space and time is found related to the algebraic decay of the interactions as $r^{-1-\sigma}$. We compare our predictions to numerics, employing tensor network techniques, for large magnetic fields, discussing the robustness of the mechanism in the full many-body dynamics.

Symmetry-controlled singlet-triplet transition in a double-barrier quantum ring

We engineer a system of two strongly confined quantum dots to gain reproducible electrostatic control of the spin at zero magnetic field. Coupling the dots in a tight ring-shaped potential with two tunnel barriers, we demonstrate that an electric field can switch the electron ground state between a singlet and a triplet configuration. Comparing our experimental co-tunneling spectroscopy data to a full many-body treatment of interacting electrons in a double-barrier quantum ring, we find excellent agreement in the evolution of many-body states with electric and magnetic fields. The calculations show that the singlet-triplet energy crossover, not found in conventionally coupled quantum dots, is made possible by the ring-shaped geometry of the confining potential.

Transient and persistent particle subdiffusion in a disordered chain coupled to bosons

We consider the propagation of a single particle in a random chain, assisted by the coupling to dispersive bosons. Time evolution treated with rate equations for hopping between localized states reveals a qualitative difference between dynamics due to noninteracting bosons and hard-core bosons. In the first case the transient dynamics is subdiffusive, but multi-boson processes allow for long-time normal diffusion, while hard-core effects suppress multi-boson processes leading to persistent subdiffusive transport, consistent with numerical results for a full many-body evolution. In contrast, analogous study for a quasiperiodic potential reveals a stable long-time diffusion.

Many-Body Quantum Chaos: Analytic Connection to Random Matrix Theory

A key goal of quantum chaos is to establish a relationship between widely observed universal spectral fluctuations of clean quantum systems and random matrix theory (RMT). For single particle systems with fully chaotic classical counterparts, the problem has been partly solved by Berry (1985) within the so-called diagonal approximation of semiclassical periodic-orbit sums. Derivation of the full RMT spectral form factor $K(t)$ from semiclassics has been completed only much later in a tour de force by Mueller et al (2004). In recent years, the questions of long-time dynamics at high energies, for which the full many-body energy spectrum becomes relevant, are coming at the forefront even for simple many-body quantum systems, such as locally interacting spin chains. Such systems display two universal types of behaviour which are termed as `many-body localized phase' and `ergodic phase'. In the ergodic phase, the spectral fluctuations are excellently described by RMT, even for very simple interactions and in the absence of any external source of disorder. Here we provide the first theoretical explanation for these observations. We compute $K(t)$ explicitly in the leading two orders in $t$ and show its agreement with RMT for non-integrable, time-reversal invariant many-body systems without classical counterparts, a generic example of which are Ising spin 1/2 models in a periodically kicking transverse field.

Interacting Bosons in a Double-Well Potential: Localization Regime

We study the ground state of a large bosonic system trapped in a symmetric double-well potential, letting the distance between the two wells increase to infinity with the number of particles. In this context, one should expect an interaction-driven transition between a delocalized state (particles are independent and all live in both wells) and a localized state (particles are correlated, half of them live in each well). We start from the full many-body Schrodinger Hamiltonian in a large-filling situation where the on-site interaction and kinetic energies are comparable. When tunneling is negligible against interaction energy, we prove a localization estimate showing that the particle number fluctuations in each well are strongly suppressed. The modes in which the particles condense are minimizers of nonlinear Schrodinger-type functionals.

Many-body effects in the excitation spectrum of weakly interacting Bose-Einstein condensates in one-dimensional optical lattices

In this work, we study many-body excitations of Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) trapped in periodic one-dimensional optical lattices. In particular, we investigate the impact of quantum depletion onto the structure of the low-energy spectrum and contrast the findings to the mean-field predictions of the Bogoliubov-de Gennes (BdG) equations. Accurate results for the many-body excited states are obtained by applying a linear-response theory atop the MCTDHB (multiconfigurational time-dependent Hartree method for bosons) equations of motion, termed LR-MCTDHB. We demonstrate for condensates in a triple well that even weak ground-state depletion of around $1\%$ leads to visible many-body effects in the low-energy spectrum which deviate substantially from the corresponding BdG spectrum. We further show that these effects also appear in larger systems with more lattice sites and particles, indicating the general necessity of a full many-body treatment.

Phantom vortices: hidden angular momentum in ultracold dilute Bose-Einstein condensates

Vortices are essential to angular momentum in quantum systems such as ultracold atomic gases. The existence of quantized vorticity in bosonic systems stimulated the development of the Gross-Pitaevskii mean-field approximation. However, the true dynamics of angular momentum in finite, interacting many-body systems like trapped Bose-Einstein condensates is enriched by the emergence of quantum correlations whose description demands more elaborate methods. Herein we theoretically investigate the full many-body dynamics of the acquisition of angular momentum by a gas of ultracold bosons in two dimensions using a standard rotation procedure. We demonstrate the existence of a novel mode of quantized vorticity, which we term the phantom vortex. Contrary to the conventional mean-field vortex, can be detected as a topological defect of spatial coherence, but not of the density. We describe previously unknown many-body mechanisms of vortex nucleation and show that angular momentum is hidden in phantom vortices modes which so far seem to have evaded experimental detection. This phenomenon is likely important in the formation of the Abrikosov lattice and the onset of turbulence in superfluids.

Variational Monte Carlo study of soliton excitations in hard-sphere Bose gases

By using a full many-body approach, we calculate the excitation energy, the effective mass and the density profile of soliton states in a three dimensional Bose gas of hard spheres at zero temperature. The many-body wave function used to describe the soliton contains a one-body term, derived from the solution of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, and a two-body Jastrow term which accounts for the repulsive correlations between atoms. We optimize the parameters in the many-body wave function via a Variational Monte Carlo procedure, calculating the grand-canonical energy and the canonical momentum of the system in a moving reference frame where the soliton is stationary. As the density of the gas is increased, significant deviations from the mean-field predictions are found for the excitation energy and the density profile of both dark and grey solitons. In particular, the soliton effective mass $m^\ast$ and the mass $m\Delta N$ of missing particles in the region of the density depression are smaller than the result from the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, their ratio being however well reproduced by this theory up to large values of the gas parameter. We also calculate the profile of the condensate density around the soliton notch finding good agreement with the prediction of the local density approximation.

Many-body tunneling dynamics of Bose-Einstein condensates and vortex states in two spatial dimensions

In this work, we study the out-of-equilibrium many-body tunneling dynamics of a Bose-Einstein condensate in a two-dimensional radial double well. We investigate the impact of interparticle repulsion and compare the influence of angular momentum on the many-body tunneling dynamics. Accurate many-body dynamics are obtained by solving the full many-body Schr\"odinger equation. We demonstrate that macroscopic vortex states of definite total angular momentum indeed tunnel and that, even in the regime of weak repulsions, a many-body treatment is necessary to capture the correct tunneling dynamics. As a general rule, many-body effects set in at weaker interactions when the tunneling system carries angular momentum.

The mean-field approximation and the non-linear Schrödinger functional for trapped Bose gases

We study the ground state of a trapped Bose gas, starting from the full many-body Schrodinger Hamiltonian, and derive the nonlinear Schrodinger energy functional in the limit of large particle number, when the interaction potential converges slowly to a Dirac delta function. Our method is based on quantitative estimates on the discrepancy between the full many-body energy and its mean-field approximation using Hartree states. These are proved using finite dimensional localization and a quantitative version of the quantum de Finetti theorem. Our approach covers the case of attractive interactions in the regime of stability. In particular, our main new result is a derivation of the 2D attractive nonlinear Schrodinger ground state.

Condensate fragmentation as a sensitive measure of the quantum many-body behavior of bosons with long-range interactions

The occupation of more than one single-particle state and hence the emergence of fragmentation is a many-body phenomenon universal to systems of spatially confined interacting bosons. In the present study, we investigate the effect of the range of the interparticle interactions on the fragmentation degree of one- and two-dimensional systems. We solve the full many-body Schr\"odinger equation of the system using the recursive implementation of the multiconfigurational time-dependent Hartree for bosons method, R-MCTDHB. The dependence of the degree of fragmentation on dimensionality, particle number, areal or line density and interaction strength is assessed. It is found that for contact interactions, the fragmentation is essentially density independent in two dimensions. However, fragmentation increasingly depends on density the more long-ranged the interactions become. The degree of fragmentation is increasing, keeping the particle number $N$ fixed, when the density is decreasing as expected in one spatial dimension. We demonstrate that this remains, nontrivially, true also for long-range interactions in two spatial dimensions. We, finally, find that within our fully self-consistent approach, the fragmentation degree, to a good approximation, decreases universally as $N^{-1/2}$ when only $N$ is varied.

Computational Modelling of Organic Semiconductors: From the Quantum World to Actual Devices

Computational Modelling of Organic Semiconductors: From the Quantum World to Actual Devices

Exact evaluation of the depletion force between nanospheres in a polydisperse polymer fluid under Θ conditions.

We analyze a system consisting of two spherical particles immersed in a polydispersed polymer solution under theta conditions. An exact theory is developed to describe the potential of mean force between the spheres for the case where the polymer molecular weight dispersity is described by the Schulz-Flory distribution. Exact results can be derived for the protein regime, where the sphere radius (R(s)) is small compared to the average radius of gyration of the polymer (R(g)). Numerical results are relatively easily obtained in the cases where the sphere radius is increased. We find that even when q = R(g)/R(s) ⪆ 10, then the use of a monopole expansion for the polymer end-point distribution about the spheres is sufficient. For even larger spheres q ≈ 1, accuracy is maintained by including a dipolar correction. The implications of these findings on generating a full many-body effective interaction for a collection of N spheres imbedded in the polymer solution are discussed.

Effective Josephson dynamics in resonantly driven Bose–Einstein condensates

We show that the orbital Josephson effect appears in a wide range of driven atomic Bose–Einstein condensed systems, including quantum ratchets, double wells and box potentials. We use three separate numerical methods: the Gross–Pitaevskii equation, exact diagonalization of the few-mode problem and the multi-configurational time-dependent Hartree for bosons algorithm. We establish the limits of mean-field and few-mode descriptions, demonstrating that the few-mode approximation represents the full many-body dynamics to high accuracy in the weak driving limit. Among other quantum measures, we compute the instantaneous particle current and the occupation of natural orbitals. We explore four separate dynamical regimes, the Rabi limit, chaos, the critical point and self-trapping; a favorable comparison is found even in the regimes of dynamical instabilities or macroscopic quantum self-trapping. Finally, we present an extension of the (t,t′)-formalism to general time-periodic equations of motion, which permits a systematic description of the long-time dynamics of resonantly driven many-body systems, including those relevant to the orbital Josephson effect.

A Quantum Many-Body Spin System in an Optical Lattice Clock

Strongly interacting quantum many-body systems arise in many areas of physics, but their complexity generally precludes exact solutions to their dynamics. We explored a strongly interacting two-level system formed by the clock states in (87)Sr as a laboratory for the study of quantum many-body effects. Our collective spin measurements reveal signatures of the development of many-body correlations during the dynamical evolution. We derived a many-body Hamiltonian that describes the experimental observation of atomic spin coherence decay, density-dependent frequency shifts, severely distorted lineshapes, and correlated spin noise. These investigations open the door to further explorations of quantum many-body effects and entanglement through use of highly coherent and precisely controlled optical lattice clocks.

Charged-phonon theory and Fano effect in the optical spectroscopy of bilayer graphene

Since their discovery, graphene-based systems represent an exceptional playground to explore the emergence of peculiar quantum effects. The present paper focuses on the anomalous appearance of strong infrared phonon resonances in the optical spectroscopy of bilayer graphene and on their pronounced Fano-like asymmetry, both tunable in gated devices. By developing a full microscopic many-body approach for the optical-phonon response we explain how both effects can be quantitatively accounted for by the quantum interference of electronic and phononic excitations. We show that the phonon modes borrow a large dipole intensity from the electronic background, the so-called charged-phonon effect, and at the same time interfere with it, leading to a typical Fano response. Our approach allows one to disentangle the correct selection rules that control the relative importance of the two (symmetric and antisymmetric) relevant phonon modes for different values of the doping and/or of the gap in bilayer graphene. Finally, we discuss the extension of the same theoretical scheme to the Raman spectroscopy, to explain the lack of the same features on the Raman phononic spectra. Besides its remarkable success in explaining the existing experimental data in graphene-based systems, the present theoretical approach offers a general scheme for the microscopic understanding of Fano-like features in a wide variety of other systems.

Mean-Field Dynamics of a Two-Mode Bose-Einstein Condensate Subject to Decoherence

We discuss the dynamics of Bose-Einstein condensates in a double-well potential subject to decoherence (or particle loss). Starting from the full many-body dynamics described by the master equation, an effective Gross-Pitaevskii-like equation is derived in the mean-field approximation. By numerically solving the GP equation, we find that macroscopic quantum self-trapping disappears for strong decoherence, while generalized self-trapping occurs under weak decoherence. The fixed points have been calculated, and we find that an abrupt change from elliptic to an attractor and a repeller occurs, reflecting the metastable behavior of the system around these points.

Number fluctuation dynamics of a spin-1 atomic condensate

We provide further details on atom number fluctuation during spin-mixing dynamics inside an $F=1$ spinor condensate, based on the effective quantization approach we reported earlier [L. Chang et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 080402 (2007)] for the semiclassical nonrigid pendulum model in terms of the relative phase and the atomic population in the magnetic $(B\text{\ensuremath{-}})$field insensitive hyperfine state $|{F}_{z}=0⟩$. Many features of the classical nonrigid pendulum model are reproduced. In addition, features typically associated with full quantum simulations specific to our model system, such as atom number fluctuations both in stationary states and during the dynamics of spin mixing, are faithfully revealed with our effective quantization approach. We check the validity of the effective quantization theory by performing extensive numerical comparisons with the results from full quantum many-body simulations. We study the effect of quantum coherence in our system and provide a solid theoretical basis to resolve the resolution limit in counting atoms that is needed to clearly detect quantum correlation effects in spin mixing.

Normal State of Highly Polarized Fermi Gases: Full Many-Body Treatment

We consider a single atom within a Fermi sea of atoms. We elucidate by a full many-body analysis the quite mysterious agreement between Monte Carlo results and approximate calculations taking only into account single particle-hole excitations. It results from a nearly perfect destructive interference of the contributions of states with more than one particle-hole pair. This is linked to the remarkable efficiency of the expansion in powers of hole wave vectors, the lowest order leading to perfect interference. Going up to two particle-hole pairs gives an essentially perfect agreement with known exact results. Hence our treatment amounts to an exact solution of this problem.

Many-body effects of dispersion interaction

The role of many-body (MB) dispersion forces have been analyzed for strands, films, and cubic lattices in the framework of a model Hamiltonian that allows exact solution of the multiparticle Shrodinger equation. For the systems investigated the MB contribution may be as large as 7% of specific dispersion energy and 11% of solvation energy. Nonadditivity becomes particularly important for aggregation in solution, where its effect may be several times larger than the pairwise contribution. For all systems considered, the three-body Axilrod-Teller approximation was insufficient to predict the magnitude and in some cases even the sign of the full MB effect.