Three-boson scattering hypervolume for a nonzero orbital angular momentum

TL;DR

This paper investigates the scattering hypervolume for three identical bosons with nonzero orbital angular momentum, deriving its properties, calculating energy shifts, and analyzing its impact on three-body recombination in dilute Bose gases.

Contribution

It introduces the scattering hypervolume for L=2 boson collisions, derives its expression for weak interactions, and explores its effects on energy shifts and recombination rates.

Findings

Derived the asymptotic wave function expansions for three bosons with L=2.

Calculated the scattering hypervolume D and its relation to weak potentials.

Quantified the contribution of D to energy shifts and three-body recombination rates.

Abstract

We analyze the zero energy collision of three identical bosons in the same internal state with total orbital angular momentum $L=2$, assuming short range interactions. By solving the Schr\"odinger equation asymptotically, we derive two expansions of the wave function when three bosons are far apart or a pair of bosons and the third boson are far apart. The scattering hypervolume $D$ is defined for this collision. Unlike the scattering hypervolume defined by one of us in 2008, whose dimension is length to the fourth power, the dimension of $D$ studied in the present paper is length to the eighth power. We then derive the expression of $D$ when the interaction potentials are weak, using the Born's expansion. We also calculate the energy shift of such three bosons with three different momenta $\hbar \mathbf{k_{1}}$, $\hbar\mathbf{k_{2}}$ and $\hbar\mathbf{k_{3}}$ in a large periodic box. The obtained energy shift depends on $D^{(0)}/\Omega^{2}$ and $D/\Omega^{2}$, where $D^{(0)}$ is the three-body scattering hypervolume defined for the three-body $L=0$ collision and $\Omega$ is the volume of the periodic box. We also calculate the contribution of $D$ to the three-body T-matrix element for low-energy collisions. We then calculate the shift of the energy and the three-body recombination rate due to $D^{(0)}$ and $D$ in the dilute homogeneous Bose gas. The contribution to the three-body recombination rate constant from $D$ is proportional to $T^2$ if the temperature $T$ is much larger than the quantum degeneracy temperature but still much lower than the temperature scale at which the thermal de Broglie wave length becomes comparable to the physical range of interaction.