2018/03/15 by D. K. Watson, Watson, D. K.
Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #FOS: Physical sciences #Quantum Gases (cond-mat.quant-gas) #Quantum Mechanics and Applications #Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech) #cond-mat.quant-gas #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1803.05977
6 pages, 3 figures
arxiv created 2018/03/15 · openalex publication_date 2018/03/15 · arxiv updated 2018/03/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Understanding the emergence of collective organizational phenomena is a major goal in many fields of physics from condensed matter to cosmology. Using a recently introduced manybody perturbation formalism for fermions, we propose a mechanism for the emergence of collective behavior, specifically superfluidity, driven by quantum statistics and the enforcement of the Pauli principle through the selection of normal modes. The method, which is called symmetry invariant perturbation theory (SPT), uses group theory and graphical techniques to solve the manybody Schrodinger equation through first order exactly. The solution at first order defines collective coordinates in terms of five N-body normal modes, identified as breathing, center of mass, single particle angular excitation, single particle radial excitation and phonon. A correspondence is established "on paper" that enforces the Pauli principle through the assignment of specific normal mode quantum numbers. Applied in the unitary regime, this normal mode assignment yields occupation only in an extremely low frequency N-body phonon mode at ultralow temperatures. A single particle radial excitation mode at a much higher frequency creates a gap that stabilizes the superfluidity at low temperatures. Coupled with the corresponding values for the frequencies at unitarity obtained by this manybody calculation, we obtain good agreement with experimental thermodynamic results including the lambda transition in the specific heat. Our results suggest that the emergence of collective behavior in macroscopic systems is driven by the Pauli principle and its selection of the correct collective coordinates in the form of N-body normal modes.