Abstract
The ground and low-lying collective states of a rotating system of N = 3 bosons harmonically confined in quasi-two-dimension and interacting via repulsive finite-range Gaussian potential is studied in weakly to moderately interacting regime. The N-body Hamiltonian matrix is diagonalized in subspaces of quantized total angular momenta 0 ≥ L ≥ 4N to obtain the ground and low-lying eigenstates. Our numerical results show that breathing modes with N-body eigenenergy spacing of 2ħω⊥, known to exist in strictly 2D system with zero-range (δ-function) interaction potential, may as well exist in quasi-2D system with finite-range Gaussian interaction potential. To gain an insight into the many-body states, the von Neumann entropy is calculated as a measure of quantum correlation and the conditional probability distribution is analyzed for the internal structure of the eigenstates. In the rapidly rotating regime the ground state in angular momentum subspaces L = (q/2)N (N − 1) with q = 2, 4 is found to exhibit the anticorrelation structure suggesting that it may variationally be described by a Bose-Laughlin like state. We further observe that the first breathing mode exhibits features similar to the Bose-Laughlin state in having eigenenergy, von Neumann entropy and internal structure independent of interaction for the three-boson system considered here. On the contrary, for eigenstates lying between the Bose-Laughlin like ground state and the first breathing mode, values of eigenenergy, von Neumann entropy and internal structure are found to vary with interaction.