Phase diagram and elementary excitations of strongly interacting droplets with non-local interactions

Abstract A one-dimensional bosonic gas with strong contact repulsion and attractive non-local interactions may form a quantum droplet with a flat-top density profile. We focus on a system in the Tonks–Girardeau limit of infinitely strong contact repulsion. We show that the main system features are the same for a broad class of non-local interaction potentials. Then, we focus on a limiting case, the one of slowly varying density profiles, to find approximate formulas for the surface and bulk energies of a droplet. We further characterise the system by numerically finding the excitation spectrum. It consists of two families: phononic-like excitations inside droplets and scattering modes. Analysis within the linearised regime is supplemented with the full, nonlinear dynamics of small perturbations.