A Fully Self-Consistent Treatment of Collective Fluctuations in Quantum Liquids

Recent experimental results point to the existence of coherent quantum phenomena in systems made of a large number of particles, despite the fact that for many-body systems the presence of decoherence is hardly negligible and emerging classicality is expected. This behaviour hinges on collective observables, named quantum fluctuations, that retain a quantum character even in the thermodynamic limit: they provide useful tools for studying properties of many-body systems at the...

We combine computer simulations and analytical theory to investigate the glassy dynamics in dense assemblies of athermal particles evolving under the sole influence of self-propulsion. The simulations reveal that when the persistence time of the self-propelled particles is increased, the local structure becomes more pronounced whereas the long-time dynamics first accelerates and then slows down. These seemingly contradictory evolutions are explained by constructing a nonequil...

What is the major difference between large and small systems? At small length-scales the dynamics is dominated by fluctuations, whereas at large scales fluctuations are irrelevant. Therefore, any thermodynamically consistent description of quantum systems necessitates a thorough understanding of the nature and consequences of fluctuations. In this chapter, we outline two closely related fields of research that are commonly considered separately -- fluctuation forces and fluct...

Lecture notes of the Les Houches Summer School on 'Strongly interacting quantum systems out of equilibrium'.

These lectures introduce techniques that are used in the description of systems of particles and fields at high temperature (or density). These methods have a broad range of physical applications. We shall discuss two specific applications: one related to hot and dense matter composed of quarks and gluons, with temperatures in the tera Kelvin range, the other related to Bose-Einstein condensation in ultra-cold gases, with temperatures in the nano Kelvin range. As we shall see...

Many qualitative observations on the glass transition in classical fluids are well described by the mode coupling theory (MCT) but the extent of the non-ergodicity domain is often over-estimated by this theory. Making it more quantitative while preserving its microscopic nature remains thus a current challenge. We propose here a simple heuristic modification that achieves this for the long-time limit quantities by reducing the excess of static correlations that are presumably...

This note addresses the problem of constructing a proper bosonized description of the collective modes in strongly interacting (non-)Fermi liquids which is specific to two spatial dimensions. Although, in a mild form, this subtlety exists in the Fermi liquid as well, the discussion focuses on the effects of long-ranged and/or retarded interactions which can completely destroy the fermionic quasiparticles. The present analysis also provides a further insight into the nature an...

We show that due to entanglement, quantum fluctuations may differ significantly from statistical fluctuations. We calculate quantum fluctuations of the particle number and of the energy in a sub-volume of a system of bosons in a pure state, and briefly discuss the possibility of measuring them. We find that energy fluctuations have a non-extensive nature.

We review current understanding of the non-equilibrium dynamics of collective quantum systems. We describe an approach based on the Hamiltonian formulation of superfluid hydrodynamics. It is shown that, in the presence of constant energy pumping, the nonlinear coupling of fluctuations in the density and entropy strongly affects the nonequilibrium dynamics of the system. We use the results obtained to analyze the properties of out-of-equilibrium superfluid 4He and of exciton p...

We introduce a semi-schematic mode-coupling model to describe the slow dynamics in molecular liquids, retaining explicitly only the description of the center of mass degrees of freedom. Angular degrees of freedom are condensed in a q-vector independent coupling parameter. We compare the time and q-dependence of the density fluctuation correlators with numerical data from a 250 ns long molecular dynamics simulation. Notwithstanding the choice of a network-forming liquid as a m...