The energy spectrum, atom-dimer scattering length, and atom-trimer scattering length for systems of three and four ultracold atoms with $$\delta${}$-function interactions in one dimension are presented as a function of the relative mass ratio of the interacting atoms. The Born-Oppenheimer approach is used to treat three-body (``HHL'') systems of one light and two heavy atoms, as well as four-body (``HHHL'') systems of one light and three heavy atoms. Zero-range interactions of arbitrary strength are assumed between different atoms, but the heavy atoms are assumed to be noninteracting among themselves. Fermionic and bosonic heavy atoms with both positive and negative parity are considered.

We study a three-body system with zero-range interactions in a one-dimensional harmonic trap. The system consists of two spin-polarized fermions and a third particle which is distinct from two others (2 + 1 system). First we assume that the particles have equal masses. For this case the system in the strongly and weakly interacting limits can be accurately described using wave function factorized in hypercylindrical coordinates. Inspired by this result we propose an interpolation ansatz for the wave function for arbitrary repulsive zero-range interactions. By comparison to numerical calculations, we show that this interpolation scheme yields an extremely good approximation to the numerically exact solution both in terms of the energies and also in the spin-resolved densities. As an outlook, we discuss the case of mass imbalanced systems in the strongly interacting limit. Here we find spectra that demonstrate that the triply degenerate spectrum at infinite coupling strength of the equal mass case is in some sense a singular case as this degeneracy will be broken down to a doubly degenerate or non-degenerate ground state by any small mass imbalance.

We consider a few-boson system confined to one dimension with a single distinguishable particle of lesser mass. All particle interactions are modeled with $\delta$ functions, but due to the mass imbalance the problem is nonintegrable. Universal few-body binding energies, atom-dimer and atom-trimer scattering lengths, are all calculated in terms of two parameters, namely the mass ratio $m_{\text{L}}/m_{\text{H}}$, and ratio $g_{\text{HH}}/g_{\text{HL}}$ of the $\delta$-function couplings. We specifically identify the values of these ratios for which the atom-dimer or atom-trimer scattering lengths vanish or diverge. We identify regions in this parameter space in which various few-body inelastic processes become energetically allowed. In the Tonks-Girardeau limit ($g_{\text{HH}}\to \infty$), our results are relevant to experiments involving trapped fermions with an impurity atom.

We present a multichannel model for elastic interactions, composed of an arbitrary number of coupled finite square-well potentials, and derive semianalytic solutions for its scattering behavior. Despite the model's simplicity, it is flexible enough to include many coupled short-ranged resonances in the vicinity of the collision threshold, as is necessary to describe ongoing experiments in ultracold molecules and lanthanide atoms. We also introduce a simple but physically realistic statistical ensemble for parameters in this model. We compute the resulting probability distributions of nearest-neighbor resonance spacings and analyze them by fitting to the Brody distribution. We quantify the ability of alternative distribution functions, for resonance spacing and resonance number variance, to describe the crossover regime. The analysis demonstrates that the multichannel square-well model with the chosen ensemble of parameters naturally captures the crossover from integrable to chaotic scattering as a function of closed-channel coupling strength.

We introduce a model to study the collisions of two ultracold diatomic molecules in one dimension interacting via pairwise potentials. We present results for this system and argue that it offers lessons for real molecular collisions in three dimensions. We analyze the distribution of the adiabatic potentials in the hyperspherical coordinate representation as well as the distribution of near-threshold four-body bound states, systematically studying the effects of molecular properties, such as interaction strength, interaction range, and atomic mass. It is found that the adiabatic potential's nearest-neighbor energy level distribution transitions from significant level repulsion characteristic of chaos (Brody distribution) to nonchaotic (Poisson distribution) as the two molecules are separated. For the near-threshold four-atom bound states, the case where all atoms have equal masses shows a Poissonian spacing distribution, while the unequal-mass system exhibits significant level repulsion characterized by a nonzero Brody parameter. We derive a semiclassical formula for the density of states and extract from it simple scaling laws with potential depth and range. We find good agreement between the semiclassical predictions for the density of states and the full quantum mechanical calculations.