High-fidelity pseudopotentials for the contact interaction

Abstract

The contact interaction is often used in modeling ultracold atomic gases, although it leads to pathological behavior arising from the divergence of the many-body wavefunction when two particles coalesce. This makes it difficult to use this model interaction in quantum Monte Carlo and other popular numerical methods. Researchers therefore model the contact interaction with pseudopotentials, such as the square well potential, whose scattering properties deviate markedly from those of the contact potential. In this article, we propose a family of pseudopotentials that reproduce the scattering phase shifts of the contact interaction up to a hundred times more accurately than the square well potential. Moreover, the pseudopotentials are smooth, resulting in significant improvements in efficiency when used in numerical calculations.

We have split arXiv:1403.0047 into two separate manuscripts. This submission develops the pseudopotential formalism. A second submission will study the ferromagnetic transition and p-wave superconductivity

References in corpus (6)

• Continuum variational and diffusion quantum Monte Carlo calculations
• Jastrow correlation factor for atoms, molecules, and solids
• Itinerant Ferromagnetism in a Fermi Gas of Ultracold Atoms
• Inhomogeneous backflow transformations in quantum Monte Carlo calculations
• Nonanalytic paramagnetic response of itinerant fermions away and near a ferromagnetic quantum phase transition
• Itinerant ferromagnetism in an atomic Fermi gas: Influence of population imbalance

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Effective-range dependence of resonant Fermi gases
• Effective-range dependence of two-dimensional Fermi gases