Exotic few-body bound states in a lattice

Strongly-interacting ultra-cold atoms in tight-binding optical lattice potentials provide an ideal platform to realize the fundamental Hubbard model. Here, after outlining the elementary single particle solution, we review and expand our recent work on complete characterization of the bound and scattering states of two and three bosonic atoms in a one-dimensional optical lattice. In the case of two atoms, there is a family of interaction-bound "dimer" states of co-localized particles that exists invariantly for either attractive or repulsive on-site interaction, with the energy below or above the two-particle scattering continuum, respectively. Adding then the third particle -- "monomer" -- we find that, apart from the simple strongly-bound "trimer" corresponding to all three particles occupying the same lattice site, there are two peculiar families of weakly-bound trimers with energies below and above the monomer-dimer scattering continuum, the corresponding binding mechanism being an effective particle exchange interaction

Few-Body Route to One-Dimensional Quantum Liquids

Gapless many-body quantum systems in one spatial dimension are universally described by the Luttinger liquid effective theory at low energies. Essentially, only two parameters enter the effective low-energy description, namely the speed of sound and the Luttinger parameter. These are highly system dependent and their calculation requires accurate non-perturbative solutions of the many-body problem. Here, we present a simple method that only uses collisional information to extract the low-energy properties of these systems. Our results are in remarkable agreement with available results for integrable models and from large scale Monte Carlo simulations of one-dimensional helium and hydrogen isotopes. Moreover, we estimate theoretically the critical point for spinodal decomposition in one-dimensional helium-4, and show that the exponent governing the divergence of the Luttinger parameter near the critical point is exactly 1/2, in excellent agreement with Monte Carlo simulations.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, including supplementary materia

Universality and tails of long range interactions in one dimension

Long-range interactions and, in particular, two-body potentials with power-law long-distance tails are ubiquitous in nature. For two bosons or fermions in one spatial dimension, the latter case being formally equivalent to three-dimensional $s$-wave scattering, we show how generic asymptotic interaction tails can be accounted for in the long-distance limit of scattering wave functions. This is made possible by introducing a generalisation of the collisional phase shifts to include space dependence. We show that this distance dependence is universal, in that it does not depend on short-distance details of the interaction. The energy dependence is also universal, and is fully determined by the asymptotic tails of the two-body potential. As an important application of our findings, we describe how to eliminate finite-size effects with long-range potentials in the calculation of scattering phase shifts from exact diagonalisation. We show that even with moderately small system sizes it is possible to accurately extract phase shifts that would otherwise be plagued with finite-size errors. We also consider multi-channel scattering, focusing on the estimation of open channel asymptotic interaction strengths via finite-size analysis.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figure

Effective field theory of interactions on the lattice

We consider renormalization of effective field theory interactions by discretizing the continuum on a tight-binding lattice. After studying the one-dimensional problem, we address s-wave collisions in three dimensions and relate the bare lattice coupling constants to the continuum coupling constants. Our method constitutes a very simple avenue for the systematic renormalization in effective field theory, and is especially useful as the number of interaction parameters increases.Comment: 7 pages, 0 figure

Three-body bound states in a lattice

We pursue three-body bound states in a one-dimensional tight-binding lattice described by the Bose-Hubbard model with strong on-site interaction. Apart from the simple strongly-bound "trimer" state corresponding to all three particles occupying the same lattice site, we find two novel kinds of weakly-bound trimers with energies below and above the continuum of scattering states of a single particle ("monomer") and a bound particle pair ("dimer"). The corresponding binding mechanism can be inferred from an effective Hamiltonian in the strong-coupling regime which contains an exchange interaction between the monomer and dimer. In the limit of very strong on-site interaction, the exchange-bound trimers attain a universal value of the binding energy. These phenomena can be observed with cold atoms in optical lattices

Elementary excitations of chiral Bose-Einstein condensates

We study the collective modes of a Bose-Einstein condensate subject to an optically induced density-dependent gauge potential. The corresponding interacting gauge theory lacks Galilean invariance, yielding an exotic superfluid state. The nonlinear dynamics in the presence of a current nonlinearity and an external harmonic trap are found to give rise to dynamics which violate Kohn's theorem; where the frequency of the dipole mode strongly depends on the strength of the mass current in the gas. The linearised spectrum reveals how the centre of mass and shape oscillations are coupled, whereas in the strongly nonlinear regime the dynamics is irregular.Comment: General improvements, corrections and references adde

Vortex dynamics in superfluids governed by an interacting gauge theory

We study the dynamics of a vortex in a quasi two-dimensional Bose gas consisting of light matter coupled atoms forming two-component pseudo spins. The gas is subject to a density dependent gauge potential, hence governed by an interacting gauge theory, which stems from a collisionally induced detuning between the incident laser frequency and the atomic energy levels. This provides a back-action between the synthetic gauge potential and the matter field. A Lagrangian approach is used to derive an expression for the force acting on a vortex in such a gas. We discuss the similarities between this force and the one predicted by Iordanskii, Lifshitz and Pitaevskii when scattering between a superfluid vortex and the thermal component is taken into account.Comment: 9 pages. Comments are welcom

Quantized vortices in interacting gauge theories

We consider a two-dimensional weakly interacting ultracold Bose gas whose constituents are two-level atoms. We study the effects of a synthetic density-dependent gauge field that arises from laser-matter coupling in the adiabatic limit with a laser configuration such that the single-particle zero-order vector potential corresponds to a constant synthetic magnetic field. We find a new exotic type of current non-linearity in the Gross-Pitaevskii equation which affects the dynamics of the order parameter of the condensate. We investigate the rotational properties of this system, focusing in particular on the physical conditions that make the nucleation of a quantized vortex in the system energetically favourable with respect to the non rotating solution. We point out that two different physical interpretations can be given to this new non linearity: firstly it can be seen as a local modification of the mean field coupling constant, whose value depends on the angular momentum of the condensate. Secondly, it can be interpreted as a density modulated angular velocity given to the cloud. Looking at the problem from both of these viewpoints, we analyze the physical conditions that make a single vortex state energetically favourable. In the Thomas-Fermi limit, we show that the effect of the new nonlinearity is to induce a rotation to the condensate, where the transition from non-rotating to rotating states depends on the density of the cloud.Comment: 6 pages, one figure. General improvement

Driven Topological Systems in the Classical Limit

Periodically-driven quantum systems can exhibit topologically non-trivial behaviour, even when their quasi-energy bands have zero Chern numbers. Much work has been conducted on non-interacting quantum-mechanical models where this kind of behaviour is present. However, the inclusion of interactions in out-of-equilibrium quantum systems can prove to be quite challenging. On the other hand, the classical counterpart of hard-core interactions can be simulated efficiently via constrained random walks. The non-interacting model proposed by Rudner et al. [Phys. Rev. X 3, 031005 (2013)], has a special point for which the system is equivalent to a classical random walk. We consider the classical counterpart of this model, which is exact at a special point even when hard-core interactions are present, and show how these quantitatively affect the edge currents in a strip geometry. We find that the interacting classical system is well described by a mean-field theory. Using this we simulate the dynamics of the classical system, which show that the interactions play the role of Markovian, or time dependent disorder. By comparing the evolution of classical and quantum edge currents in small lattices, we find regimes where the classical limit considered gives good insight into the quantum problem.Comment: 15 pages, 15 figures, new content on the quantum mode