Publications

Order by: publication date number of citations

• When does a Fermi puddle become a Fermi sea? Emergence of pairing in two-dimensional trapped mesoscopic Fermi gases

  Emma K. Laird, Brendan C. Mulkerin, Jia Wang, Matthew J. Davis

  SciPost Phys. 17, 163 (2024) · published 11 December 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Pairing lies at the heart of superfluidity in fermionic systems. Motivated by recent experiments in mesoscopic Fermi gases, we study up to six fermionic atoms with equal masses and equal populations in two different spin states, confined in a quasi-two-dimensional harmonic trap. We couple a stochastic variational approach with the use of an explicitly correlated Gaussian basis set, which enables us to obtain highly accurate energies and structural properties. Utilising two-dimensional two-body scattering theory with a finite-range Gaussian interaction potential, we tune the effective range to model realistic quasi-two-dimensional scattering. We calculate the excitation spectrum, pair correlation function, and number of pairs as a function of increasing attractive interaction strength. For up to six fermions in the ground state, we find that opposite spin and momentum pairing is maximised well below the Fermi surface in momentum space. By contrast, corresponding experiments on twelve fermions have found that pairing is maximal at the Fermi surface and strongly suppressed beneath [M. Holten et al., Nature 606, 287-291 (2022)]. This suggests that the Fermi sea — which acts to suppress pairing at low momenta via Pauli blocking — emerges in the transition from six to twelve particles.

• Many-body perturbation theory for strongly correlated effective Hamiltonians using effective field theory methods

  Raphaël Photopoulos, Antoine Boulet

  SciPost Phys. 18, 003 (2025) · published 6 January 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  Introducing low-energy effective Hamiltonians is usual to grasp most correlations in quantum many-body problems. For instance, such effective Hamiltonians can be treated at the mean-field level to reproduce some physical properties of interest. Employing effective Hamiltonians that contain many-body correlations renders the use of perturbative many-body techniques difficult because of the overcounting of correlations. In this work, we develop a strategy to apply an extension of the many-body perturbation theory starting from an effective interaction that contains correlations beyond the mean-field level. The goal is to re-organize the many-body calculation to avoid the overcounting of correlations originating from the introduction of correlated effective Hamiltonians in the description. For this purpose, we generalize the formulation of the Rayleigh-Schrödinger perturbation theory by including free parameters adjusted to reproduce the appropriate limits. In particular, the expansion in the bare weak-coupling regime and the strong-coupling limit serves as a valuable input to fix the value of the free parameters appearing in the resulting expression. This method avoids double counting of correlations using beyond-mean-field strategies for the description of many-body systems. The ground state energy of various systems relevant for ultracold atomic, nuclear, and condensed matter physics is reproduced qualitatively beyond the domain of validity of the standard many-body perturbation theory. Finally, our method suggests interpreting the formal results obtained as an effective field theory using the proposed reorganization of the many-body calculation. The results, like ground state energies, are improved systematically by considering higher orders in the extended many-body perturbation theory while maintaining a straightforward polynomial expansion.

• Achieving quantum advantage in a search for a violations of the Goldbach conjecture, with driven atoms in tailored potentials

  Oleksandr V. Marchukov, Andrea Trombettoni, Giuseppe Mussardo, Maxim Olshanii

  SciPost Phys. Core 8, 074 (2025) · published 28 October 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  The famous Goldbach conjecture states that any even natural number $N$ greater than $2$ can be written as the sum of two prime numbers $p^{\text{(I)}}$ and $p^{\text{(II)}}$. In this article we propose a quantum analogue device that solves the following problem: given a small prime $p^{\text{(I)}}$, identify a member $N$ of a $\mathcal{N}$-strong set even numbers for which $N-p^{\text{(I)}}$ is also a prime. A table of suitable large primes $p^{\text{(II)}}$ is assumed to be known a priori. The device realizes the Grover quantum search protocol and as such ensures a $\sqrt{\mathcal{N}}$ quantum advantage. Our numerical example involves a set of 51 even numbers just above the highest even classical-numerically explored so far [T. O. e Silva, S. Herzog, and S. Pardi, Mathematics of Computation 83, 2033 (2013)]. For a given small prime number $p^{\text{(I)}}=223$, it took our quantum algorithm 5 steps to identify the number $N=4× 10^{18}+14$ as featuring a Goldbach partition involving $223$ and another prime, namely $p^{\text{(II)}}=4× 10^{18}-239$. Currently, our algorithm limits the number of evens to be tested simultaneously to $\mathcal{N} \sim \ln(N)$: larger samples will typically contain more than one even that can be partitioned with the help of a given $p^{\text{(I)}}$, thus leading to a departure from the Grover paradigm.

• Spin-orbit photonics in a fixed cavity: Harnessing Bogoliubov modes of a Bose-Einstein condensate

  Ghaisud Din, Muqaddar Abbas, Pei Zhang

  SciPost Phys. Core 8, 082 (2025) · published 12 November 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We present a theoretical investigation of spin-orbit photonics within a fixed mirror cavity system containing a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), in which the Bogoliubov excitation modes of the condensate are treated as effective mechanical oscillators. By embedding the condensate in a single-mode optical cavity, we explore the emergence and modulation of the photonic spin Hall effect (PSHE) through the spin-dependent transverse shifts of a weak probe field. The optical response —encoded in the real and imaginary components of the output field susceptibility— is systematically analyzed as a function of the condensate-cavity coupling strength, revealing a controllable enhancement or suppression of the spin-orbit interaction. Our model captures how the interplay between collective BEC excitations and cavity photon dynamics induces nontrivial modifications in spin-dependent light propagation. Notably, we uncover that the Bogoliubov mode coupling acts as a tunable channel for mediating spin angular momentum transfer within the cavity, offering a novel route for engineering compact, quantum-coherent spin-orbit photonic devices.

• Necklace Ansatz for strongly repulsive spin mixtures on a ring

  Gianni Aupetit-Diallo, Giovanni Pecci, Artem Volosniev, Mathias Albert, Anna Minguzzi, Patrizia Vignolo

  SciPost Phys. Core 8, 022 (2025) · published 14 February 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We propose an alternative to the Bethe Ansatz method for repulsive strongly-interacting fermionic (or bosonic) mixtures on a ring. Starting from the knowledge of the solution for single-component non-interacting fermions (or strongly-interacting bosons), we explicitly impose periodic condition on the amplitudes of the spin configurations. This reduces drastically the number of independent complex amplitudes that we determine by constrained diagonalization of an effective Hamiltonian. This procedure allows us to obtain a complete basis for the exact low-energy many-body solutions for mixtures with a large number of particles, both for $SU(\kappa)$ and symmetry-breaking systems.

• Suppression of scattering from slow to fast subsystems and application to resonantly Floquet-driven impurities in strongly interacting systems

  Friedrich Hübner

  SciPost Phys. 16, 005 (2024) · published 5 January 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  We study solutions to the Lippmann-Schwinger equation in systems where a slow subsystem is coupled to a fast subsystem via an impurity. Such situations appear when a high-frequency Floquet-driven impurity is introduced into a low-energy system, but the driving frequency is at resonance with a high-energy band. In contrast to the case of resonant bulk driving, where the particles in the low-energy system are excited into the high-energy band, we surprisingly find that these excitations are suppressed for resonantly driven impurities. Still, the transmission through the impurity is strongly affected by the presence of the high-energy band in a universal way that does not depend on the details of the high-energy band. We apply our general result to two examples and show the suppression of excitations from the low-energy band into the high-energy band: a) bound pairs in a Fermi-Hubbard chain scattering at a driven impurity, which is at resonance with the Hubbard interaction and b) particles in a deep optical lattice described by the tight-binding approximation, which scatter at a driven impurity, whose driving frequency equals the band gap between the two lowest energy bands.