Semiclassical Theory of Few- and Many-body Quantum Systems with Short-range Interactions

The thesis addresses the fundamental interplay between indistinguishability and interactions in few- and many-body quantum systems, treated in two separate approaches, both analytic in nature, using semiclassical methods. The few-body sector, considering a strictly fixed number of particles, is addressed within the framework of first quantization. By sticking to descriptions as (micro-)canonical ensembles the approach overcomes the inappropriate use of virial expansions. It is based on cluster expansions where quantum statistics are treated exactly and interparticle forces are described non-perturbatively. After a full formal development the cluster expansions are supplemented with short-time dynamical information that is equated with the description of smooth spectral properties or equivalently temperatures above strong quantum degeneracy, which, in the single-particle context, is the essential ingredient to what is known as semiclassical Weyl expansions. This reduction allows for the fully analytical description of universal features of large classes of systems by either truncating to a specific class of allowed collision processes, i.e., two-body collisions, or by extracting higher-order interaction kernels from related integrable models. The consistent combination with scaling considerations, minimal ground-state information and strong-coupling expansions leads to a toolbox providing most of the thermodynamic and spectral properties of one-dimensional systems with short-range interactions, all in terms of the lowest-order interaction kernels. The analytical results are in excellent qualitative and quantitative agreement with extensive numerical simulations for both integrable and non-integrable models of experimental relevance in cold atom physics. The many-body sector is in contrast treated in the second quantized formulation of quantum mechanics making use of the well-known collection of semiclassical methods that are subsumed under the name periodic orbit theory. As these methods apply in a highly system specific manner, the attractive Bose gas on a ring is chosen as exemplary model to show a case where the semiclassical quantization of mean-field dynamics, here considered as the classical analogue, can be used to obtain analytical non-trivial information on correlation-related many-body effects, especially related to quantum critical behavior in this model. After a simplification by truncating to the lowest single-particle momentum modes the consistent application of Einstein-Brillouin-Keller quantization yields a description valid for large numbers of bosons. Besides analytically reproducing numerical spectra to high accuracy, the approach enables one to extract asymptotic scaling laws for level spacings around quantum criticality, representing properties. These (finite) energy differences are intrinsically tied to inter-particle correlations and therefore elude a more conventional description by means of a mean-field theory extended with Bogoliubov quasi particles. An application to the scrambling time of the system, related to a pseudo quantum butterfly effect that stems from a local instability, underlines the importance of the method in the otherwise inaccessible regime of extreme particle numbers.