Frontier Research Institute for Interdisciplinary Sciences
Tohoku University

In a microscopic world, atoms, electrons, and nuclei are described by quantum mechanics. When these particles interacts with each other, they start to get correlated and show interesting collective behavior. Understanding the nature of correlated quantum systems is one of the most important goal of modern science and pivotal to understanding various phenomena in Nature, from the nuclear reactions, chemical reactions of atoms/molecules, electrons’ motion in solid-state devices, to neutron stars.

Can these seemingly different systems behave similarly, so that they can be described by a unified manner? The key idea here is the “universality” of strongly interacting quantum systems. With ultracold atomic gases, it is now possible to simulate various quantum systems by varying interactions between atoms as desired. In particular, it has been shown that three-atom states, appearing in a strongly interacting atomic gas, show the same behavior as three-body states in nuclei and magnetic materials. They are understood as the Efimov states, universal 3-body phenomenon . Can 4-body, 5-body and even many-body systems show similar universality?

My research focus is such universality of few-body and many-body quantum systems. I am particularly interested in accurately taking into account 3-body and higher-body quantum correlations in various strongly interacting few- and many-body systems and obtain a unified understanding of cold atoms, nuclei, and condensed matters.