A Microscopic Look at Liquid Helium: the 3He Impurity Case

The description of the properties of liquid Helium is a challenge for any microscopic many-body theory. In this context, we study the ground state and the excitation spectrum of one $^3$He impurity in liquid $^4$He at T=0 with the aim of illustrating the power of the correlated basis function formalism in describing heavily correlated systems. The strong interatomic interaction and the large density require the theory to be pushed to a high degree of sophistication. A many-body correlation operator containing explicit two- and thre-particle correlation functions is needed to obtain a realistic ground state wave function, whereas a perturbative expansion including up to two phonon correlated states must be enforced to study the impurity excitation energies. The theory describes accurately the experimental spectrum along all the available momentum range. As empirically shown by the experiments, a marked deviation from the quadratic Landau-Pomeranchuck behavior is found and the momentum dependent effective mass of the impurity increases of $\sim50~$ at $q\sim1.7~\AA^{-1}$ with respect to its q=0 value. Although the main emphasis is given to the Correlated Basis Function theory, we present also comparisons with other methods, as diffusion Monte Carlo, variational Monte Carlo with shadow wave functions and time dependent correlations.Comment: 16 pages, 2 figs, world-scientific latex style. Proceedings of Many Body X, Seattle, 10-15 Sept. 199

Energy and structure of dilute hard- and soft-sphere gases

The energy and structure of dilute hard- and soft-sphere Bose gases are systematically studied in the framework of several many-body approaches, as the variational correlated theory, the Bogoliubov model and the uniform limit approximation, valid in the weak interaction regime. When possible, the results are compared with the exact diffusion Monte Carlo ones. A Jastrow type correlation provides a good description of the systems, both hard- and soft-spheres, if the hypernetted chain energy functional is freely minimized and the resulting Euler equation is solved. The study of the soft-spheres potentials confirms the appearance of a dependence of the energy on the shape of the potential at gas paremeter values of $x \sim 0.001$. For quantities other than the energy, such as the radial distribution functions and the momentum distributions, the dependence appears at any value of $x$. The occurrence of a maximum in the radial distribution function, in the momentum distribution and in the excitation spectrum is a natural effect of the correlations when $x$ increases. The asymptotic behaviors of the functions characterizing the structure of the systems are also investigated. The uniform limit approach results very easy to implement and provides a good description of the soft-sphere gas. Its reliability improves when the interaction weakens.Comment: Accepted in Phys. Rev.

Deuteron distribution in nuclei and the Levinger's factor

We compute the distribution of quasideuterons in doubly closed shell nuclei. The ground states of $^{16}$O and $^{40}$Ca are described in $ls$ coupling using a realistic hamiltonian including the Argonne $v_{8}^\prime$ and the Urbana IX models of two-- and three--nucleon potentials, respectively. The nuclear wave function contains central and tensor correlations, and correlated basis functions theory is used to evaluate the distribution of neutron-proton pairs, having the deuteron quantum numbers, as a function of their total momentum. By computing the number of deuteron--like pairs we are able to extract the Levinger's factor and compare to both the available experimental data and the predictions of the local density approximation, based on nuclear matter estimates. The agreement with the experiments is excellent, whereas the local density approximation is shown to sizably overestimate the Levinger's factor in the region of the medium nuclei.Comment: 26 pages, 8 figures, typeset using REVTe

Spin-orbit and tensor interactions in homogeneous matter of nucleons: accuracy of modern many-body theories

We study the energy per particle of symmetric nuclear matter and pure neutron matter using realistic nucleon--nucleon potentials having non central tensor and spin--orbit components, up to three times the empirical nuclear matter saturation density, $\rho_0=0.16$ fm$^{-3}$. The calculations are carried out within the frameworks of the Brueckner--Bethe--Goldstone (BBG) and Correlated Basis Functions (CBF) formalisms, in order to ascertain the accuracy of the methods. The two hole--line approximation, with the continuous choice for the single particle auxiliary potential, is adopted for the BBG approach, whereas the variational Fermi Hypernetted Chain/Single Operator Chain theory, corrected at the second order perturbative expansion level, is used in the CBF one. The energies are then compared with the available Quantum and Variational Monte Carlo results in neutron matter and with the BBG, up to the three hole--line diagrams. For neutron matter and potentials without spin--orbit components all methods, but perturbative CBF, are in reasonable agreement up to $\rho\sim$ 3 $\rho_0$. After the inclusion of the LS interactions, we still find agreement around $\rho_0$, whereas it is spoiled at larger densities. The spin--orbit potential lowers the energy of neutron matter at $\rho_0$ by $\sim$ 3--4 MeV per nucleon. In symmetric nuclear matter, the BBG and the variational results are in agreement up to $\sim$ 1.5 $\rho_0$. Beyond this density, and in contrast with neutron matter, we find good agreement only for the potential having spin--orbit components.Comment: 18 pages, 4 tables. Accepted in PL

Momentum distributions in ^3He-^4He liquid mixtures

We present variational calculations of the one-body density matrices and momentum distributions for ^3He-^4He mixtures in the zero temperature limit, in the framework of the correlated basis functions theory. The ground-state wave function contains two- and three-body correlations and the matrix elements are computed by (Fermi)Hypernetted Chain techniques. The dependence on the ^3He concentration (x_3) of the ^4He condensate fraction $(n_0^{(4)})$ and of the ^3He pole strength (Z_F) is studied along the P=0 isobar. At low ^3He concentration, the computed ^4He condensate fraction is not significantly affected by the ^3He statistics. Despite of the low x_3 values, Z_F is found to be quite smaller than that of the corresponding pure ^3He because of the strong ^3He-^4He correlations and of the overall, large total density \rho. A small increase of $n_0^{(4)}$ along x_3 is found, which is mainly due to the decrease of \rho respect to the pure ^4He phase.Comment: 23 pages, 7 postscript figures, Revte

A model of short-range correlations in the charge response

The validity of a model treating the short-range correlations up to the first order is studied by calculating the charge response of an infinite system and comparing the obtained results with those of a Fermi Hypernetted Chain calculation.Comment: 6 pages, 3 Postscript figures, to be published on Phys. Rev.