Abstract:
Using the exact

-particle ground state wave function for a
one-dimensional gas of hard-core bosons in a harmonic trap we
develop an algorithm to compute the reduced single-particle
density matrix and corresponding momentum distribution. Accurate
numerical results are presented for up to

particles, and the
momentum distributions are compared to a recent analytic
approximation.
Momentum distribution for a one-dimensional trapped gas of hard-core bosons
G.J. Lapeyre, Jr.
M.D. Girardeau
E.M. Wright
Optical
Sciences Center and Department of Physics, University of Arizona,
Tucson, AZ 85721
Date: September 22, 2002
Introduction
Recent advances in atom waveguide technology
[25,4,15,22,13,23,19,5,2,12]
and the realization of Bose-Einstein condensates in optical
and magnetic traps of variable aspect ratio
[11,10] have spurred interest in the
properties of degenerate quantum gases in lower dimensions. In
particular, the Tonks gas, in which strong
transverse confinement and low temperature and density allow the
gas to be modeled as a one-dimensional (1D) system of point
particles with hard-core interactions [20,21],
is of considerable theoretical interest due to the fact that it
defies a mean-field description, but is on the other hand exactly
soluble via the Fermi-Bose mapping [6,7].
Although the exact many-body wave function can be written in a compact
form using the mapping theorem, obtaining information about important
observables has proven to be a difficult task. One such quantity that
bears the signature of the Tonks gas is the momentum distribution,
which has a sharp peak at zero momentum [20], in
contrast to the Fermi sea for the corresponding 1D gas of fermions. In
a mathematical tour de force, Lenard [16] obtained
upper bounds on the momentum distribution for a homogeneous Tonks
gas, and some elaborations of that work followed [24]. In a
previous paper [9] we obtained numerical results for
the momentum distribution of a harmonically trapped Tonks gas for up
to
particles, and Minguzzi et al. [18]
developed an analytic approximation for the high-momentum tail of the
momentum distribution of a trapped gas. Cazalilla [3]
obtained an analytic approximation for the momentum distribution
of Tonks gas confined in a box using a description of the system as
a Luttinger liquid.
Our previous calculations of a trapped Tonks gas were performed
using a Monte Carlo (MC) integration of the many-body wave function to
obtain the single-particle reduced density matrix from which the
momentum distribution was obtained via Fourier
transformation. Although the data thus generated were useful, an
improved method is desirable because of the limited accuracy of MC
integration. Even these MC data were limited to
particles,
which required weeks of computer time. It seems clear that the way
forward is to have high-precision numerical data available for testing
the validity of approximations. In this paper we start from the
-particle ground state wave function for a one-dimensional
condensate of hard-core bosons in a harmonic trap and develop an
algorithm to compute the reduced single-particle density matrix and
momentum distribution. The key advantage of this approach is
that, although we are limited to only
particles at present by
computer resources, these data are of high precision, thus providing a
testing ground for analytic approximations.
In Sec. 2, we give a precise definition of the
system and find the ground state wave function using the Fermi-Bose
mapping theorem. In Sec. 3, we write the
single-particle reduced density matrix
and develop a method
for its numerical solution. In Sec. 4 we use these
results for
to evaluate the momentum distribution and compare
the results to a recent approximation for the high-momentum tail.
Ground state wave function
The Hamiltonian of
bosons in a 1D harmonic trap is
![$\displaystyle \hat{H}=\sum_{j=1}^{N} \left[-\frac{\hbar{^2}}{2m}\frac{\partial^2}{\partial {\tilde x}_{j}^{2}} +\frac{1}{2}m\omega^{2}{\tilde x}_{j}^{2}\right] .$](img12.png) |
(1) |
We assume that the two-body interaction potential consists only of
a hard-core of 1D diameter
. This is conveniently treated as a
constraint on allowed wave functions
such that
if |
(2) |
rather than as an infinite interaction potential. It follows from
the Fermi-Bose mapping theorem
[6,7,8] that the exact
-boson
ground state
of the Hamiltonian (1) with the
constraint (2) is
 |
(3) |
where
is the ground state of a fictitious system of
spinless fermions with the same Hamiltonian (1) and
constraint. At low densities it is sufficient
[20,21] to consider the case of impenetrable point
particles, the zero-range limit
of Eq. (2). Since wave
functions of ``spinless fermions'' are antisymmetric under coordinate
exchanges, their wave functions vanish automatically whenever any
, the constraint has no effect, and the corresponding
fermionic ground state is the ground state of the ideal gas of
fermions, a Slater determinant of the lowest
single-particle
eigenfunctions
of the harmonic oscillator (HO)
 |
(4) |
The HO orbitals are
 |
(5) |
with
the Hermite polynomials and
the ground state width of the harmonic trap for a single atom. For
convenience, we introduce the dimensionless coordinates
, and the corresponding ground state wave function
. As we have shown in previous work [9],
substitution of Eq. (5) into Eq. (4) and some matrix
manipulations [1] lead to a simple but exact expression of
the Bijl-Jastrow pair product form for the
-boson ground state:
![$\displaystyle \psi_{B0}(x_{1},\ldots,x_{N})=C_{N}\left[\prod_{i=1}^{N}e^{-x_{i}^{2}/2} \right] \prod_{1\le j<k\le N}\vert x_{k}-x_{j}\vert,$](img29.png) |
(6) |
with normalization constant
![$\displaystyle C_{N}=2^{N(N-1)/4} \left[N!\prod_{n=0}^{N-1}n!\sqrt{\pi}\right]^{-1/2}.$](img30.png) |
(7) |
Single-particle density matrix
The reduced single-particle density matrix with normalization
for the ground state given by
Eq. (6) is
where the integration is from
to
for each
coordinate unless otherwise stated, and
![$\displaystyle {\mathcal N}_N = N 2^{N(N-1)/2} \pi^{-N/2} \left[ \prod_{n=0}^N n! \right]^{-1},$](img39.png) |
(9) |
and we have defined
In the following subsection, we develop a method for analyzing
. We will see that, when
is small enough (say
or
), the exact expression is manageable, but that we must turn to
numerical methods for larger
.
Figure 1:
Gray scale plots of the dimensionless reduced
density matrix
as a function of the
dimensionless
coordinates
and
, for (a)
, (b)
, and (c)
.
![\includegraphics[width=15cm, angle=0]{Fig1.eps}](img47.png) |
The multidimensional integral (10) can be expressed in
terms of polynomials, Gaussians, and error functions. But, even for
relatively small
, the number of terms in such an expression is too
large to be useful when written. We previously evaluated the reduced
single-particle density matrix using
MC methods [9], but with limited numerical accuracy. Here we
present a seminumerical approach in which we represent the integral
in terms of incomplete gamma functions and evaluate the result to
machine precision for particular values of
and
.
We reduce the integral
to incomplete gamma functions in
the following way. Consider the case
. We first integrate
over
, writing
where
and
The integrand
is an analytic function of
, and
( in the sense that derivatives of all orders in these variables
exist), so that the integral over each of the three intervals is
analytic in these variables. Furthermore, we can evaluate the
integral over
in Eq. (12) easily because the integrand
is a Gaussian multiplied by a polynomial. We next integrate over
, getting
where
and
It is important to note that, because
is a polynomial in
, the integral
in Eq. (15) can be
solved by the same technique used to solve
in Eq. (12).
We continue this procedure, defining
, etc., until all of
the integrals are finished. At each stage, one has a more complicated
polynomial in the remaining independent variables in the integrand.
Before continuing, we note that there is, of course, nothing
essentially new when we choose
. For instance, for
, we
have
 |
(17) |
If we examine each of the integrals
above, we see
that all of the integrals to be computed can be reduced to terms
proportional to integrals of the form
 |
(18) |
and
 |
(19) |
We now present an algorithm for expressing the integrals
in terms of the
defined in Eqs. (18) and
(19). To achieve this for
, we take
, drop the
factor of
, expand the remaining factors as a
polynomial in
, and replace each occurrence of
with
. The result is
expressed as a polynomial in
with coefficients involving the
.
This expression for
is substituted into Eq. (15) and the
same procedure is then used to compute
, and so on, until all
powers of
have been replaced by
. This procedure
can be simplified by performing all of these substitutions at once.
To this end, consider
 |
(20) |
To compute the integral
given in Eq. (10), we
expand Eq. (20) and substitute
for each occurrence
of
, for any
. In addition, for each value of
for
which a term is independent of
, a factor of
must be
included. The result is
expressed as a polynomial in the
for approximately
values of
. Rather than print the
results, we store a table of the coefficients of the powers of
on a computer. Then, a table of the
is computed
for a particular pair
, and
is computed using
this table together with the table of coefficients.
Evaluating the
using numerical integration is relatively
inefficient. Instead, we evaluate them numerically using well-known,
efficient routines to compute incomplete gamma functions.
We define an indefinite integral
 |
(21) |
Then using definitions (18) and (19) we
have
is continuous, but has a cusp at
.
For numerical computation, we use
and
In this section we carry out in detail the algorithm given above for
two particles and give the result for three particles. We first
choose
and tabulate the required values of
and
.
Integrating Eq. (21) by parts, we write
Using Eq. (22) we then have
Applying the algorithm outlined in the previous section we find for two particles
For
, one can easily compute the expression for
in terms
of
by hand, with the result
where
,
, and the explicit dependence of
on
and
is omitted for clarity. For larger values of
,
rapidly becomes more difficult to compute by hand. In
the next section we present the results of carrying out the algorithm
detailed above on a computer.
We have evaluated the above integrals numerically for
-
.
Figure 1 shows a gray scale plot of the dimensionless
reduced single-particle density matrix
versus the normalized coordinates
and
for (a)
, (b)
, and (c)
. We verified that along the diagonal
reproduced the single-particle density
[14].
Momentum distribution
In terms of the boson annihilation and creation operators in position
representation (quantized Bose field operators) the one-particle
reduced density matrix is
 |
(25) |
The momentum distribution function
, normalized to
, is
where
is the annihilation operator for a boson with momentum
. Then
 |
(26) |
The spectral representation of the density matrix then leads to
where the
are Fourier
transforms of the natural orbitals:
.
Figure 2:
Dimensionless momentum distribution
versus
normalized momentum
for
,
, and
. Note the peaks becoming sharper with increasing
.
![\includegraphics[width=\columnwidth,angle=0]{Fig2.eps}](img149.png) |
Figure 3:
Dimensionless momentum distribution
versus normalized momentum
on log-log scale.
The dashed line is the asymptotic expression given
by Eqs. (27) and (28).
![\includegraphics[width=\columnwidth,angle=0]{Fig3.eps}](img150.png) |
Figure 2 shows the numerically calculated dimensionless
momentum distribution
versus normalized momentum
, with
, for (a)
, (b)
, and
(c)
. We typically evaluated
to machine precision
for smaller values of
, with precision decreasing to a part in
for the largest values of
. The key features are
that the momentum distribution maintains the peaked structure reminiscent
of the spatially uniform case [20,17] for the 1D
HO, and that the peak becomes sharper with increasing atom number
.
This is to be expected since as the number of atoms increases the
many-body repulsion causes the system to become more spatially uniform
within the trap interior.
Minguzzi et al. [18] determined that the momentum
distribution for finite
decays according to
 |
(27) |
where
depends only on the number of particles.
In particular, for
, they found
 |
(28) |
Figure 3 shows our numerical results for
approaching this asymptotic form.
The dashed line in Fig. 3 shows
versus
, and we see that
this approximation agrees with our numerical results for
for
high momenta. Furthermore, inspection of the numerical results for
other values of
shows a
dependence in the high-momentum tail.
Summary and conclusions
In summary, we have developed a method for obtaining high-accuracy
results for the momentum distributions of trapped Tonks gases, and
presented results for up to eight particles. Our results agree
reasonably with the high-momentum approximation
obtained by Minguzzi et al.
This work was supported by Office of Naval Research
Grant No. N00014-99-1-0806 and the U.S. Army Research Office.
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John Lapeyre
2002-09-22