Saturation properties of helium drops from a leading-order description

Abstract

Saturation properties are directly linked to the short-range scale of the two-body interaction of the particles. The case of helium is special; on one hand, the two-body potential has a strong repulsion at short distances. On the other hand, the extremely weak binding of the helium dimer locates this system very close to the unitary limit allowing for a description based on an effective theory. At leading order of this theory a two- and a three-body term appear, each one characterized by a low-energy constant. In a potential model this description corresponds to a soft potential model with a two-body term purely attractive plus a three-body term purely repulsive constructed to describe the dimer and trimer binding energies. Here we analyze the capability of this model to describe the saturation properties making a direct link between the low-energy scale and the short-range correlations. We will show that the energy per particle, EN/N, can be obtained with reasonable accuracy at leading order extending the validity of this approximation, characterizing universal behavior in few-boson systems close to the unitary limit, to the many-body system.