Exploring Integrability-Chaos Transition with a Sequence of Independent Perturbations.

A gas of interacting particles is a paradigmatic example of chaotic systems. It is shown here that, even if all but one particle are fixed in generic positions, the excited states of the moving particle are chaotic. They are characterized by the number of principal components (NPC)-the number of integrable system eigenstates involved into the nonintegrable one, which increases linearly with the number of strong scatterers. This rule is a particular case of the general effect of an additional perturbation on the system chaotic properties. The perturbation independence criteria supposing the system chaoticity increase are derived here as well. The effect can be observed in experiments with photons or cold atoms as the decay of observable fluctuation variance, which is inversely proportional to NPC and, therefore, to the number of scatterers. This decay indicates that the eigenstate thermalization is approached. The results are confirmed by numerical calculations for a harmonic waveguide with zero-range scatterers along its axis.

Quantum Fluctuations of the Center of Mass and Relative Parameters of Nonlinear Schrödinger Breathers.

We study quantum fluctuations of macroscopic parameters of a nonlinear Schrödinger breather-a nonlinear superposition of two solitons, which can be created by the application of a fourfold quench of the scattering length to the fundamental soliton in a self-attractive quasi-one-dimensional Bose gas. The fluctuations are analyzed in the framework of the Bogoliubov approach in the limit of a large number of atoms N, using two models of the vacuum state: white noise and correlated noise. The latter model, closer to the ab initio setting by construction, leads to a reasonable agreement, within 20% accuracy, with fluctuations of the relative velocity of constituent solitons obtained from the exact Bethe-ansatz results [Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 220401 (2017)PRLTAO0031-900710.1103/PhysRevLett.119.220401] in the opposite low-N limit (for N≤23). We thus confirm, for macroscopic N, the breather dissociation time to be within the limits of current cold-atom experiments. Fluctuations of soliton masses, phases, and positions are also evaluated and may have experimental implications.

Phase Transitions in Definite Total Spin States of Two-Component Fermi Gases.

Second-order phase transitions have no latent heat and are characterized by a change in symmetry. In addition to the conventional symmetric and antisymmetric states under permutations of bosons and fermions, mathematical group-representation theory allows for non-Abelian permutation symmetry. Such symmetry can be hidden in states with defined total spins of spinor gases, which can be formed in optical cavities. The present work shows that the symmetry reveals itself in spin-independent or coordinate-independent properties of these gases, namely as non-Abelian entropy in thermodynamic properties. In weakly interacting Fermi gases, two phases appear associated with fermionic and non-Abelian symmetry under permutations of particle states, respectively. The second-order transitions between the phases are characterized by discontinuities in specific heat. Unlike other phase transitions, the present ones are not caused by interactions and can appear even in ideal gases. Similar effects in Bose gases and strong interactions are discussed.

Dissociation of One-Dimensional Matter-Wave Breathers due to Quantum Many-Body Effects.

We use the ab initio Bethe ansatz dynamics to predict the dissociation of one-dimensional cold-atom breathers that are created by a quench from a fundamental soliton. We find that the dissociation is a robust quantum many-body effect, while in the mean-field (MF) limit the dissociation is forbidden by the integrability of the underlying nonlinear Schrödinger equation. The analysis demonstrates the possibility to observe quantum many-body effects without leaving the MF range of experimental parameters. We find that the dissociation time is of the order of a few seconds for a typical atomic-soliton setting.

Permutation symmetry in spinor quantum gases: selection rules, conservation laws, and correlations.

Many-body systems of identical arbitrary-spin particles, with separable spin and spatial degrees of freedom, are considered. Their eigenstates can be classified by Young diagrams, corresponding to nontrivial permutation symmetries (beyond the conventional paradigm of symmetric-antisymmetric states). The present work obtains the following. (a) Selection rules for additional nonseparable (dependent on spins and coordinates) k-body interactions: the Young diagrams, associated with the initial and final states of a transition, can differ by relocation of no more than k boxes between their rows. (b) Correlation rules in which eigenstate-averaged local correlations of k particles vanish if k exceeds the number of columns (for bosons) or rows (for fermions) in the associated Young diagram. It also elucidates the physical meaning of the quantities conserved due to permutation symmetry-in 1929, Dirac identified those with characters of the symmetric group-relating them to experimentally observable correlations of several particles. The results provide a way to control the formation of entangled states belonging to multidimensional non-Abelian representations of the symmetric group. These states can find applications in quantum computation and metrology.

An exactly solvable model for the integrability-chaos transition in rough quantum billiards.

A central question of dynamics, largely open in the quantum case, is to what extent it erases a system's memory of its initial properties. Here we present a simple statistically solvable quantum model describing this memory loss across an integrability-chaos transition under a perturbation obeying no selection rules. From the perspective of quantum localization-delocalization on the lattice of quantum numbers, we are dealing with a situation where every lattice site is coupled to every other site with the same strength, on average. The model also rigorously justifies a similar set of relationships, recently proposed in the context of two short-range-interacting ultracold atoms in a harmonic waveguide. Application of our model to an ensemble of uncorrelated impurities on a rectangular lattice gives good agreement with ab initio numerics.

Dynamics of relaxation and fluctuations of the equilibrium state in an incompletely chaotic system.

An incompletely chaotic system, with a perturbation of the integrable part that does not obey selection rules, relaxes to an equilibrium state that lies between the initial state and thermal equilibrium. We analyze here a system of two atoms in a circular transversally harmonic waveguide. The dynamics of expectation values of generic observables and their fluctuations in the long-time limit are studied for this model. The relaxation demonstrates a nonexponential behavior and slows down as the initial-state energy increases. The fluctuation amplitude has a tendency to decrease with an increase of the initial state width.