Abstract
The three-body problem is notoriously hard to solve, as explained to a general audiance in Liu Cixin's novels. In condensed matter physics, this problem is exacerbated by the fact that the interaction energy of a three-particle system cannot be decomposed in a sum of pairwise interactions. The part that cannot be reduced is called the three-body interaction, and is typically neglected. However, in extreme cases, the three-body interactions can become dominant over pairwise terms. In ultracold atomic gases, these interactions can stabilize superfluid droplets, which would otherwise collapse. So far, these droplets have remained elusive, but the overall goal of this project is to calculate conditions under which they could be observed, and to work together with experimentalists to finally create this system so crucial to our understanding of three-body physics. Doing so requires a unique combination of expertise in many-body physics and few-body physics, that is realized by combining my skills in three-body coupled channel calculations with my host's expertise in many-body physics. We will go beyond deriving the formation criteria for these droplets, and also propose a way to characterize their properties by using an impurity as a probe in a variety of media and mixtures of quantum fluids. The theoretical analysis and creation of the three-body interaction stabilized droplets will have an important impact on the understanding of a broad class of quantum many-body systems.
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