From Bosonic Grand-Canonical Ensembles to Nonlinear Gibbs Measures

In a recent paper, in collaboration with Mathieu Lewin and Phan Th{\`a}nh Nam, we showed that nonlinear Gibbs measures based on Gross-Pitaevskii like functionals could be derived from many-body quantum mechanics, in a mean-field limit. This text summarizes these findings. It focuses on the simplest, but most physically relevant, case we could treat so far, namely that of the defocusing cubic NLS functional on a 1D interval. The measure obtained in the limit, which (almost) lives over H^{1/2} , has been previously shown to be invariant under the NLS flow by Bourgain.Comment: This is the text of a Laurent Schwartz X-EDP seminar I gave in November 2014. It summarizes some of the results of arXiv:1410.033

On the stability of 2D dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates

We study the existence of energy minimizers for a Bose-Einstein condensate with dipole-dipole interactions, tightly confined to a plane. The problem is critical in that the kinetic energy and the (partially attractive) interaction energy behave the same under mass-preserving scalings of the wave-function. We obtain a sharp criterion for the existence of ground states, involving the optimal constant of a certain generalized Gagliardo-Nirenberg inequality

The Laughlin liquid in an external potential

We study natural perturbations of the Laughlin state arising from the effects of trapping and disorder. These are N-particle wave functions that have the form of a product of Laughlin states and analytic functions of the N variables. We derive an upper bound to the ground state energy in a confining external potential, matching exactly a recently derived lower bound in the large N limit. Irrespective of the shape of the confining potential, this sharp upper bound can be achieved through a modification of the Laughlin function by suitably arranged quasi-holes.Comment: Typos corrected and one remark added. To be published in Letters in Mathematical Physic

Higher Dimensional Coulomb Gases and Renormalized Energy Functionals

We consider a classical system of n charged particles in an external confining potential, in any dimension d larger than 2. The particles interact via pairwise repulsive Coulomb forces and the coupling parameter scales like the inverse of n (mean-field scaling). By a suitable splitting of the Hamiltonian, we extract the next to leading order term in the ground state energy, beyond the mean-field limit. We show that this next order term, which characterizes the fluctuations of the system, is governed by a new "renormalized energy" functional providing a way to compute the total Coulomb energy of a jellium (i.e. an infinite set of point charges screened by a uniform neutralizing background), in any dimension. The renormalization that cuts out the infinite part of the energy is achieved by smearing out the point charges at a small scale, as in Onsager's lemma. We obtain consequences for the statistical mechanics of the Coulomb gas: next to leading order asymptotic expansion of the free energy or partition function, characterizations of the Gibbs measures, estimates on the local charge fluctuations and factorization estimates for reduced densities. This extends results of Sandier and Serfaty to dimension higher than two by an alternative approach.Comment: Structure has slightly changed, details and corrections have been added to some of the proof

Incompressibility Estimates for the Laughlin Phase

This paper has its motivation in the study of the Fractional Quantum Hall Effect. We consider 2D quantum particles submitted to a strong perpendicular magnetic field, reducing admissible wave functions to those of the Lowest Landau Level. When repulsive interactions are strong enough in this model, highly correlated states emerge, built on Laughlin's famous wave function. We investigate a model for the response of such strongly correlated ground states to variations of an external potential. This leads to a family of variational problems of a new type. Our main results are rigorous energy estimates demonstrating a strong rigidity of the response of strongly correlated states to the external potential. In particular we obtain estimates indicating that there is a universal bound on the maximum local density of these states in the limit of large particle number. We refer to these as incompressibility estimates

On the binding of polarons in a mean-field quantum crystal

We consider a multi-polaron model obtained by coupling the many-body Schr\"odinger equation for N interacting electrons with the energy functional of a mean-field crystal with a localized defect, obtaining a highly non linear many-body problem. The physical picture is that the electrons constitute a charge defect in an otherwise perfect periodic crystal. A remarkable feature of such a system is the possibility to form a bound state of electrons via their interaction with the polarizable background. We prove first that a single polaron always binds, i.e. the energy functional has a minimizer for N=1. Then we discuss the case of multi-polarons containing two electrons or more. We show that their existence is guaranteed when certain quantized binding inequalities of HVZ type are satisfied.Comment: 28 pages, a mistake in the former version has been correcte

Boundary Behavior of the Ginzburg-Landau Order Parameter in the Surface Superconductivity Regime

We study the 2D Ginzburg-Landau theory for a type-II superconductor in an applied magnetic field varying between the second and third critical value. In this regime the order parameter minimizing the GL energy is concentrated along the boundary of the sample and is well approximated to leading order by a simplified 1D profile in the direction perpendicular to the boundary. Motivated by a conjecture of Xing-Bin Pan, we address the question of whether this approximation can hold uniformly in the boundary region. We prove that this is indeed the case as a corollary of a refined, second order energy expansion including contributions due to the curvature of the sample. Local variations of the GL order parameter are controlled by the second order term of this energy expansion, which allows us to prove the desired uniformity of the surface superconductivity layer

Quantum Hall phases and plasma analogy in rotating trapped Bose gases

A bosonic analogue of the fractional quantum Hall eff ect occurs in rapidly rotating trapped Bose gases: There is a transition from uncorrelated Hartree states to strongly correlated states such as the Laughlin wave function. This physics may be described by eff ective Hamiltonians with delta interactions acting on a bosonic N-body Bargmann space of analytic functions. In a previous paper [N. Rougerie, S. Serfaty, J. Yngvason, Phys. Rev. A 87, 023618 (2013)] we studied the case of a quadratic plus quartic trapping potential and derived conditions on the parameters of the model for its ground state to be asymptotically strongly correlated. This relied essentially on energy upper bounds using quantum Hall trial states, incorporating the correlations of the Bose-Laughlin state in addition to a multiply quantized vortex pinned at the origin. In this paper we investigate in more details the density of these trial states, thereby substantiating further the physical picture described in [N. Rougerie, S. Serfaty, J. Yngvason, Phys. Rev. A 87, 023618 (2013)], improving our energy estimates and allowing to consider more general trapping potentials. Our analysis is based on the interpretation of the densities of quantum Hall trial states as Gibbs measures of classical 2D Coulomb gases (plasma analogy). New estimates on the mean- field limit of such systems are presented.Comment: Minor modification