Energy level splitting for weakly interacting bosons in a harmonic trap

Abstract

We consider identical quantum bosons with weak contact interactions in a two-dimensional isotropic harmonic trap. When the interactions are turned off, the energy levels are equidistant and highly degenerate. At linear order in the coupling parameter, these degenerate levels split, and we study the patterns of this splitting. It turns out that the problem is mathematically identical to diagonalizing the quantum resonant system of the two-dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii equation, whose classical counterpart has been previously studied in the mathematical literature on turbulence. Our purpose is to explore the implications of the symmetries and energy bounds of this resonant system, previously studied for the classical case, for the quantum level splitting. Simplifications in computing the splitting spectrum numerically result from exploiting the symmetries. The highest energy state emanating from each unperturbed level is explicitly described by our analytics. We furthermore discuss the energy level spacing distributions in the spirit of quantum chaos theory. After separating the eigenvalues into blocks with respect to the known conservation laws, we observe the Wigner-Dyson statistics within specific large blocks, which leaves little room for further integrable structures in the problem beyond the symmetries that are already explicitly known.