Universality of quantum liquids and droplets in one dimension

Abstract

We consider interacting one-dimensional bosons in the universal low-energy regime. The interactions consist of a combination of attractive and repulsive parts that can stabilize quantum gases, droplets, and liquids. In particular, we study the role of effective three-body repulsion, in systems with weak attractive pairwise interactions. Its low-energy description is often argued to be equivalent to a model including only two-body interactions with nonzero range. Here, we show that, at zero temperature, the equations of state in both theories agree quantitatively at low densities for overall repulsion, in the gas phase. However, this agreement is absent in the attractive regime, where universality only occurs in the long-distance properties of quantum droplets. We develop analytical tools to investigate the properties of the theory and obtain astounding agreement with exact numerical calculations using the density-matrix renormalization group.