Bosonic Particle-Correlated States: A Nonperturbative Treatment Beyond Mean Field for Strongly Interacting Systems

Abstract

Many useful properties of dilute Bose gases at ultra-low temperature are predicted precisely by the product-state ansatz, in which all particles are in the same quantum state. As particle-particle correlations become important, however, the product ansatz begins to fail. We consider a new set of states, which constitute a natural generalization of the product ansatz; the particle-correlated state of $N=l\times n$ identical particles is derived by symmetrizing the $n$-fold product of an $l$-particle quantum state. The particle-correlated states can be simulated efficiently for large $N$, because their parameter spaces, which depend on $l$, do not grow with $n$. Here we pay special attention to the pure-state case for $l=2$, where the many-body state is constructed from a two-particle pure state. These paired wave functions for bosons, which we call pair-correlated states (PCS), were introduced by Leggett [Rev. Mod. Phys. $\bf 73$, 307 (2001)] as a particle-number-conserving version of the Bogoliubov approximation. We present an iterative algorithm that solves the reduced (marginal) density matrices (RDMs)---these are the correlation functions---associated with PCS in time $O(N)$. The RDMs can also be derived from the normalization factor of PCS, which is derived analytically in the large $N$ limit. To test the efficacy of our theory, we analyze the ground state of the two-site Bose-Hubbard model by minimizing the energy of the PCS state, both in its exact form and in its large-$N$ approximate form. The relative errors of the ground state energy for both cases are within $10^{-5}$ for $N = 1000$ particles over the entire parameter region from a single condensate to a Mott insulator. Moreover, we present numerical results that suggest that PCS might be useful for describing the dynamics in the strongly interacting regime.