Scaling behavior of Tan's contact for trapped Lieb-Liniger bosons : from two to many

Abstract

We show that the contact parameter of N harmonically trapped interacting one-dimensional bosons at zero temperature can be analytically and accurately obtained by a simple rescaling of the exact two-boson solution, and that N-body effects can be almost factorized. The small deviations observed between our analytical results and density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) calculations are more pronounced when the interaction energy is maximal (i.e., at intermediate interaction strengths) but they remain bounded by the large-N local-density approximation obtained from the Lieb-Liniger equation of state stemming from the Bethe ansatz. The rescaled two-body solution is so close to the exact ones, that is possible, within a simple expression interpolating the rescaled two-boson result to the local density, to obtain N-boson contact and ground-state energy functions in very good agreement with DMRG calculations. Our results suggest a change of paradigm in the study of interacting quantum systems, giving to the contact parameter a more fundamental role than energy.