Gas-to-soliton transition of attractive bosons on a spherical surface

Abstract

We investigate the ground state properties of $N$ bosons with attractive zero-range interactions characterized by the scattering length $a>0$ and confined to the surface of a sphere of radius $R$. We present the analytic solution of the problem for $N=2$, mean-field analysis for $N\to \infty$, and exact diffusion Monte-Carlo results for intermediate $N$. For finite $N$, we observe a smooth crossover from the uniform state in the limit $a/R\gg 1$ (weak attraction) to a localized state at small $a/R$ (strong attraction). With increasing $N$ this crossover narrows down to a discontinuous transition from the uniform state to a soliton of size $\sim R/\sqrt{N}$. The two states are separated by an energy barrier, tunneling under which is exponentially suppressed at large $N$. The system behavior is marked by a peculiar competition between space-curvature effects and beyond-mean-field terms, both breaking the scaling invariance of a two-dimensional mean-field theory.

10 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (13)

• Extension of Bogoliubov theory to quasi-condensates
• Atomtronic circuits: from many-body physics to quantum technologies
• Observation of ultracold atomic bubbles in orbital microgravity
• Universal Properties of Two-Dimensional Boson Droplets
• Realization of a Townes soliton in a two-component planar Bose gas
• Expansion dynamics of a shell-shaped Bose-Einstein condensate
• Low-dimensional quantum gases in curved geometries
• Universal low-energy properties of three two-dimensional particles
• Observation of scale invariance in two-dimensional matter-wave Townes solitons
• Ground state of weakly repulsive soft-core bosons on a sphere
• Supersolid phases of bosonic particles in a bubble trap
• Higher-order effective interactions for bosons near a two-body zero crossing
• Townes soliton and beyond: Non-miscible Bose mixtures in 2D

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Colloquium: Synthetic quantum matter in non-standard geometries
• Bose-Einstein condensation in exotic lattice geometries
• Dimer problem on a spherical surface
• Two-dimensional bosonic droplets in a harmonic trap
• Beyond-mean-field analysis of the Townes soliton and its breathing mode
• Generalized Gross-Pitaevskii Equation for 2D Bosons with Attractive Interactions