Three- and four-boson systems expanded around the unitarity limit: Application to $^4$He

Abstract

The three- and four-boson systems with a large scattering length and a short effective range in the two-body sector are studied in the framework of Short-Range Effective Field Theory. The starting point (leading order) of the EFT is taken to be the universal unitarity limit, where the two-body sector is parameter-free and only one three-body parameter enters. In this limit, physical systems manifests discrete scale invariance. Deviations from universality arising from finite scattering-length and effective-range corrections, as well as a four-body force required by renormalization, are included perturbatively at next-to-leading order. The three-body ground state and its associated four-body ground and first-excited states are studied using the Faddeev-Yakubovsky formalism and a complementary diagrammatic approach. By employing techniques to remove contributions from deep trimers in tetramer calculations, we extend our analysis to larger cutoffs than previously accessible within the FY approach. Our results for binding energies and radii of $^4$He three- and four-atom systems converge well to results obtained with sophisticated phenomenological potentials. These successes suggest that the physics of $^4$He atomic clusters is governed by only small deviations from discrete scale invariance.