Tonks-Girardeau and Super Tonks-Girardeau States of a Trapped 1D Spinor Bose Gas (1008.0428v2)

Abstract: A harmonically trapped ultracold 1D spin-1 Bose gas with strongly repulsive or attractive 1D even-wave interactions induced by a 3D Feshbach resonance is studied. The exact ground state, a hybrid of Tonks-Girardeau (TG) and ideal Fermi gases, is constructed in the TG limit of infinite even-wave repulsion by a spinor Fermi-Bose mapping to a spinless ideal Fermi gas. It is then shown that in the limit of infinite even-wave attraction this same state remains an exact many-body eigenstate, now highly excited relative to the collapsed generalized McGuire cluster ground state, showing that the hybrid TG state is completely stable against collapse to this cluster ground state under a sudden switch from infinite repulsion to infinite attraction. It is shown to be the TG limit of a hybrid super Tonks-Girardeau (STG) state which is metastable under a sudden switch from finite but very strong repulsion to finite but very strong attraction. It should be possible to create it experimentally by a sudden switch from strongly repulsive to strongly attractive interaction, as in the recent Innsbruck experiment on a spin-polarized bosonic STG gas. In the case of strong attraction there should also exist another STG state of much lower energy, consisting of strongly bound dimers, a bosonic analog of a recently predicted STG gas which is an ultracold gas of strongly bound bosonic dimers of fermionic atoms, but it is shown that this STG state cannot be created by such a switch from strong repulsion to strong attraction.