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

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

Constructive role of dissipation for driven coupled bosonic modes

We theoretically investigate a system of two coupled bosonic modes subject to both dissipation and external driving. We show that in the steady state the degree of entanglement between the coupled bosonic modes can be enhanced by dissipation. The non-monotonic dependence of entanglement on the decay rates is observed when the bosonic modes are asymmetrically coupled to their local baths. This counterintuitive result opens a new way to better understand the interplay between noise and coherence in continuous variable systems driven away from equilibrium.Comment: 4.5 pages. Published version (with minor modifications

Markovian evolution of strongly coupled harmonic oscillators

We investigate how to model Markovian evolution of coupled harmonic oscillators, each of them interacting with a local environment. When the coupling between the oscillators is weak, dissipation may be modeled using local Lindblad terms for each of the oscillators in the master equation, as is commonly done. When the coupling between oscillators is strong, this model may become invalid. We derive a master equation for two coupled harmonic oscillators which are subject to individual heat baths modeled by a collection of harmonic oscillators, and show that this master equation in general contains non-local Lindblad terms. We compare the resulting time evolution with that obtained for dissipation through local Lindblad terms for each individual oscillator, and show that the evolution is different in the two cases. In particular, the two descriptions give different predictions for the steady state and for the entanglement between strongly coupled oscillators. This shows that when describing strongly coupled harmonic oscillators, one must take great care in how dissipation is modeled, and that a description using local Lindblad terms may fail. This may be particularly relevant when attempting to generate entangled states of strongly coupled quantum systems.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, significantly revised and close to the published versio

Investigating the generality of time-local master equations

Time-local master equations are more generally applicable than is often recognised, but at first sight it would seem that they can only safely be used in time intervals where the time evolution is invertible. Using the Jaynes-Cummings model, we here construct an explicit example where two different Hamiltonians, corresponding to two different non-invertible and non-Markovian time evolutions, will lead to arbitrarily similar time-local master equations. This illustrates how the time-local master equation on its own in this case does not uniquely determine the time evolution. The example is nevertheless artificial in the sense that a rapid change in (at least) one of the Hamiltonians is needed. The change must also occur at a very specific instance in time. If a Hamiltonian is known not to have such very specific behaviour, but is "physically well-behaved", then one may conjecture that a time-local master equation also determines the time evolution when it is not invertible.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure

Coexistence of spin-1/2 and spin-1 Dirac-Weyl fermions in the edge-centered honeycomb lattice

We investigate the properties of an edge-centered honeycomb lattice, and show that this lattice features both spin-1/2 and spin-1 Dirac-Weyl fermions at different filling fractions f (f=1/5,4/5 for spin-1/2 and f=1/2 for spin-1). This five-band system is the simplest lattice that can support simultaneously the two different paradigmatic Dirac-Weyl fermions with half-integer spin and integer spin. We demonstrate that these pseudo-relativistic structures, including a flat band at half-filling, can be deduced from the underlying Kagome sublattice. We further show that the signatures of the two kinds of relativistic fermions can be clearly revealed by several perturbations, such as a uniform magnetic field, a Haldane-type spin-orbit term, and charge density waves. We comment on the possibility to probe the similarities and differences between the two kinds of relativistic fermions, or even to isolate them individually. We present a realistic scheme to realize such a system using cold atoms.Comment: published versio

Mobile spin impurity in an optical lattice

We investigate the Fermi polaron problem in a spin-1/2 Fermi gas in an optical lattice for the limit of both strong repulsive contact interactions and one dimension. In this limit, a polaronic-like behaviour is not expected, and the physics is that of a magnon or impurity. While the charge degrees of freedom of the system are frozen, the resulting tight-binding Hamiltonian for the impurity's spin exhibits an intriguing structure that strongly depends on the filling factor of the lattice potential. This filling dependency also transfers to the nature of the interactions for the case of two magnons and the important spin balanced case. At low filling, and up until near unit filling, the single impurity Hamiltonian faithfully reproduces a single-band, quasi-homogeneous tight-binding problem. As the filling is increased and the second band of the single particle spectrum of the periodic potential is progressively filled, the impurity Hamiltonian, at low energies, describes a single particle trapped in a multi-well potential. Interestingly, once the first two bands are fully filled, the impurity Hamiltonian is a near-perfect realisation of the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model. Our studies, which go well beyond the single-band approximation, that is, the Hubbard model, pave the way for the realisation of interacting one-dimensional models of condensed matter physics.Comment: 13 pages, 12 figures, accepted in New Journal of Physic