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Ground-state energy, density profiles, and momentum distribution of attractively interacting 1D Fermi gases with hard-wall boundaries: a Monte Carlo study

Motivated by the realization of hard-wall boundary conditions in experiments with ultracold atoms, we investigate the ground-state properties of spin-1/2 fermions with attractive interactions in a one-dimensional box. We use lattice Monte Carlo methods to determine essential quantities like the energy, which we compute as a function of coupling strength and particle number in the regime from few to many particles. Many-fermion systems bound by hard walls display non-trivial density profiles characterized by so-called Friedel oscillations (which are similar to those observed in harmonic traps). In non-interacting systems, the characteristic length scale of the oscillations is set by (2 kF)^(-1), where kF is the Fermi momentum, while repulsive interactions tend to generate Wigner-crystal oscillations of period (4 kF)^(-1). Based on the non-interacting result, we find a remarkably simple parametrization of the density profiles of the attractively interacting case, which we generalize to the one-body density matrix. While the total momentum is not a conserved quantity in the presence of hard walls, the magnitude of the momentum does provide a good quantum number. We are therefore able to provide a detailed characterization of the (quasi-)momentum distribution, which displays rather robust discontinuity at the Fermi surface. In addition, we determine the spatially varying on-site density-density correlation, which in turn yields Tan's contact density and, upon integration, Tan's contact. As is well known, the latter fully determines the short-range correlations and plays a crucial role in a multitude of equilibrium and non-equilibrium sum rules.