English

The helium trimer with soft-core potentials

Atomic and Molecular Clusters 2015-03-17 v1 Nuclear Theory

Abstract

The helium trimer is studied using two- and three-body soft-core potentials. Realistic helium-helium potentials present an extremely strong short-range repulsion and support a single, very shallow, bound state. The description of systems with more than two helium atoms is difficult due to the very large cancellation between kinetic and potential energy. We analyze the possibility of describing the three helium system in the ultracold regime using a gaussian representation of a widely used realistic potential, the LM2M2 interaction. However, in order to describe correctly the trimer ground state a three-body force has to be added to the gaussian interaction. With this potential model the two bound states of the trimer and the low energy scattering helium-dimer phase shifts obtained with the LM2M2 potential are well reproduced.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1101.1719,
  title  = {The helium trimer with soft-core potentials},
  author = {A. Kievsky and E. Garrido and C. Romero-Redondo and P. Barletta},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1101.1719},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

15 pages, 3 figures, submitted to Few-Body Systems

R2 v1 2026-06-21T17:09:31.346Z