Correlated Trapped Bosons and the Many-Body Efimov Effect

Abstract

We study two-body correlations in systems of identical bosons. We use a Faddeev type of decomposition of the wave function where all pairs of particles are treated equally. We focus on a new multi-particle Efimov effect at large scattering length, where infinitely many loosely bound many-body states appear. A confining external trap only allows a finite number of such spatially extended negative energy states inside the trap. The stability of a Bose condensate is determined by the decay into these model independent intermediate states which in turn decay into dimers.