English

How bosonic is a pair of fermions?

Quantum Physics 2014-11-26 v2

Abstract

Composite particles made of two fermions can be treated as ideal elementary bosons as long as the constituent fermions are sufficiently entangled. In that case, the Pauli principle acting on the parts does not jeopardise the bosonic behaviour of the whole. An indicator for bosonic quality is the composite boson normalisation ratio χN+1/χN\chi_{N+1}/\chi_{N} of a state of NN composites. This quantity is prohibitively complicated to compute exactly for realistic two-fermion wavefunctions and large composite numbers NN. Here, we provide an efficient characterisation in terms of the purity PP and the largest eigenvalue λ1\lambda_1 of the reduced single-fermion state. We find the states that extremise χN\chi_N for given PP and λ1\lambda_1, and we provide easily evaluable, saturable upper and lower bounds for the normalisation ratio. Our results strengthen the relationship between the bosonic quality of a composite particle and the entanglement of its constituents.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1310.8488,
  title  = {How bosonic is a pair of fermions?},
  author = {Malte C. Tichy and P. Alexander Bouvrie and Klaus Mølmer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1310.8488},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

minor changes, accepted by Applied Physics B, 11 pages, 5 figures