Energy level statistics of interacting trapped bosons

Abstract

It is an well established fact that statistical properties of energy level spectra are the most efficient tool to characterize nonintegrable quantum systems. The study of statistical properties and spectral fluctuation in the interacting many boson systems have developed a new interest in this direction. Specially we are interested in the weakly interacting trapped bosons in the context of Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) as the energy spectrum shows a transition from the collective to single particle nature with the increase in the number of levels. However this has received less attention as it is believed that the system may exhibit Poisson like fluctuations due to the existence of external harmonic trap. Here we compute numerically the energy levels of the zero-temperature many-boson systems which are weakly interacting through the van der Waals potential and are in the 3D confined harmonic potential. We study the nearest neighbour spacing distribution and the spectral rigidity by unfolding the spectrum. It is found that increase in number of energy levels for repulsive BEC induces a transition from a Wigner like form displaying level repulsion to Poisson distribution for P(s). It does not follow the GOE prediction. For repulsive interaction, the lower levels are correlated and manifest level repulsion. For intermediate levels P (s) shows mixed statistic which clearly signifies the existence of two energy scales: external trap and interatomic interaction. Whereas for very high levels the trapping potential dominates, genarating Poisson distribution. Comparison with mean-field results for lower levels are also presented. For attractive BEC near the critical point we observe the Shrielman like peak near s=0 which signifies the presence of large number of quasi-degenerate states.