Universal vortex formation in rotating traps with bosons and fermions

When a system consisting of many interacting particles is set rotating, it may form vortices. This is familiar to us from every-day life: you can observe vortices while stirring your coffee or watching a hurricane. In the world of quantum mechanics, famous examples of vortices are superconducting films and rotating bosonic $^4$He or fermionic $^3$He liquids. Vortices are also observed in rotating Bose-Einstein condensates in atomic traps and are predicted to exist for paired fermionic atoms. Here we show that the rotation of trapped particles with a repulsive interaction leads to a similar vortex formation, regardless of whether the particles are bosons or (unpaired) fermions. The exact, quantum mechanical many-particle wave function provides evidence that in fact, the mechanism of this vortex formation is the same for boson and fermion systems.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Spectral properties of rotating electrons in quantum dots and their relation to quantum Hall liquids

The exact diagonalization technique is used to study many-particle properties of interacting electrons with spin, confined in a two-dimensional harmonic potential. The single-particle basis is limited to the lowest Landau level. The results are analyzed as a function of the total angular momentum of the system. Only at angular momenta corresponding to the filling factors 1, 1/3, 1/5 etc. the system is fully polarized. The lowest energy states exhibit spin-waves, domains, and localization, depending on the angular momentum. Vortices exist only at excited polarized states. The high angular momentum limit shows localization of electrons and separation of the charge and spin excitations.Comment: 14 pages 18 figure

Symmetry breaking and quantum correlations in finite systems: Studies of quantum dots and ultracold Bose gases and related nuclear and chemical methods

Investigations of emergent symmetry breaking phenomena occurring in small finite-size systems are reviewed, with a focus on the strongly correlated regime of electrons in two-dimensional semicoductor quantum dots and trapped ultracold bosonic atoms in harmonic traps. Throughout the review we emphasize universal aspects and similarities of symmetry breaking found in these systems, as well as in more traditional fields like nuclear physics and quantum chemistry, which are characterized by very different interparticle forces. A unified description of strongly correlated phenomena in finite systems of repelling particles (whether fermions or bosons) is presented through the development of a two-step method of symmetry breaking at the unrestricted Hartree-Fock level and of subsequent symmetry restoration via post Hartree-Fock projection techniques. Quantitative and qualitative aspects of the two-step method are treated and validated by exact diagonalization calculations. Strongly-correlated phenomena emerging from symmetry breaking include: (I) Chemical bonding, dissociation, and entanglement (at zero and finite magnetic fields) in quantum dot molecules and in pinned electron molecular dimers formed within a single anisotropic quantum dot. (II) Electron crystallization, with particle localization on the vertices of concentric polygonal rings, and formation of rotating electron molecules (REMs) in circular quantum dots. (III) At high magnetic fields, the REMs are described by parameter-free analytic wave functions, which are an alternative to the Laughlin and composite-fermion approaches. (IV) Crystalline phases of strongly repelling bosons. In rotating traps and in analogy with the REMs, such repelling bosons form rotating boson molecules (RBMs).Comment: Review article published in Reports on Progress in Physics. REVTEX4. 95 pages with 37 color figures. To download a copy with high-quality figures, go to publication #82 in http://www.prism.gatech.edu/~ph274cy

Finite boson and fermion systems under extreme rotation: edge reconstruction and vortex formation

Vortices can form when finite quantal systems are set rotating. In the limit of small particle numbers, the vortex formation in a harmonically trapped fermion system, with repulsively interacting particles, shows similarities to the corresponding boson system, with vortices entering the rotating cloud for increasing rotation. For a larger number of fermions, N greater than or similar to 15, the fermion vortices compete and co-exist with (Chamon-Wen) edge-reconstructed ground states, forcing some ground states, as for example the central single vortex, into the spectrum of excited states. Experimentally, the fermion system could, for instance, be electrons in a semiconductor heterostructure, a quantum dot, and the corresponding boson system, a Bose-Einstein condensate in a magneto optical trap

Correlation and spin polarization in quantum dots: local spin density functional theory revisited

Using quantum dot artificial atoms as a simple toy model, we reflect on the question of whether spin density functional theory (SDFT) can accurately describe correlation effects in low-dimensional fermion systems. Different expressions for the local density approximation of the exchange-correlation energy for the two-dimensional electron gas, such as the much-used functional of Tanatar and Ceperley, and the recent suggestion by Attaccalite et al., are compared with the results of a numerical diagonalization of the many-body Hamiltonian matrix in the limit of small electron numbers. For systems with degeneracies, as shown in the present work for the example of a spin triplet with S = 1, the direct comparison with configuration interaction (CI) methods demonstrates that the spin representation of SDFT may, under certain circumstances, produce artificial energy splittings between states that belong to the same spin multiplet. For a singlet ground state with S = Sz = 0, however, the correlation functions of the CI solutions confirm the spin-density wave states found earlier within the SDFT method

Quantum dots and quantum dot lattices:Correlations in small quantal systems

Recently, Attaccalite et al. proposed a new expression for the exchange-correlation energy of the two-dimensional electron gas, based on quantum Monte Carlo calculations. We compare this functional with the established expression given by Tanatar and Ceperley for use in density functional calculations. As model systems serve a circular few-electron quantum dot and a square lattice of dots. For single dots, electronic structure calculations are performed using both energy functionals for the self-consistent solution of the Kohn-Sham equations. The results are compared with those of a numerical diagonalization of the many-body Hamiltonian