Ultracold bose and fermi dipolar gasesa quantum monte carlo study

Abstract

The object of study of this thesis are dipolar systems in the quantum degenerate regime. In general, dealing with many-body systems and evaluating their properties requires to deal with the the Schrödinger equation. In the present study we employ different Monte Carlo methods that allow to find numerical solutions to it by employing a set of stochastic techniques. The simplest one that we introduce corresponds to the Variational Monte Carlo (VMC) method, that despite its simplicity, allows to obtain variational solutions to the many-body problem. A more accurate description is provided by Diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC), that provides exact solutions for the ground state of the system when dealing with bosons. We continue presenting two methods that rely on the Feynman's path integral formalism of quantum mechanics: Path Integral Monte Carlo (PIMC) and Path Integral Ground State (PIGS), that provide exact solutions for the bosonic problem at finite and zero temperature respectively. In order to work with fermionic systems, as we do in chapter 4 of this thesis, the DMC algorithm has to be modified with the Fixed-Node (FN) approximation, what alows to avoid the sign problem. Doing so, the results obtained with DMC correspond to variational upper bounds to the energy. In chapter 3 we study the superfluid properties of a system of dipolar bosons that are fully polarized and in which the atoms are restricted to move in the plane. We also consider that all the dipolar moments form a certain tilting angle with the axis perpendicular to the plane, what allows to introduce anisotropy in the system. The phase diagram at zero temperature of this system reveals the existence of three different phases: gas, stripe and solid. Here we focus on the characterization of the superfluid properties across that phase diagram. Our calculations allow to address the question of whether the stripe phase of this system could be a candidate for the supersolid, a system that simultaneously exhibit spatial long-range order and superfluidity. By the employment of DMC and PIGS, we report finite supefluid and condensate fractions, both in the gas and the stripe phases. Then, the study is completed by performing finite temperature calculations, where the use of PIMC allows to characterize the BKT transition and to report the critical temperature at which it occurs in the different phases. Finally, by direct comparison with the predictions of the Luttinger Liquid theory, we explicitly show that the stripe phase can not be described as an ensemble of 1D isolated systems. In chapter 4, we study the fermionic dipolar system in two dimensions, focusing in the case in which all dipoles are polarized along the direction, that in this case is chosen to be the one perpendicular to the plane containing their movement. We compute the equation of state of the system in a wide range of interaction parameters. In the low density regime, the comparison of our results for the dipolar model with those of a hard-disks one allows to determine the regime of universality. On the other hand, at higher densities ( and before crystallization), we discuss the issue of itinerant ferromagnetism, that is, the possibility of having a polarized phase as the ground state of the system. The repulsive Fermi polaron with dipolar interaction, that corresponds to the limit of ultralow concentration of impurities embebed in a fermionic bath is also studied. Here we determine the regime of universality for this problem and compute observables that allow to discuss the validity of the quasi-particle picture. In the last part of the thesis, the formation of ultra-dilute dipolar droplets is studied. Our results are in agreement with experimental measurements performed with dysprosium atoms. On the other hand, the evaluation of their differences with the prediction of the extended Gross-Pitaevskii equation makes it possible to determine the limits of the mean-field approach to this problem.