Universality and scaling limit of weakly-bound tetramers

Abstract

The occurrence of a new limit cycle in few-body physics, expressing a universal scaling function relating the binding energies of two consecutive tetramer states, is revealed, considering a renormalized zero-range two-body interaction applied to four identical bosons. The tetramer energy spectrum is obtained when adding a boson to an Efimov bound state with energy $B_3$ in the unitary limit (for zero two-body binding, or infinite two-body scattering length). Each excited $N-$th tetramer energy $B_4^{(N)}$ is shown to slide along a scaling function as a short-range four-body scale is changed, emerging from the 3+1 threshold for a universal ratio $B_4^ {(N)}/B_3 \simeq 4.6$, which does not depend on $N$. The new scale can also be revealed by a resonance in the atom-trimer recombination process.