Harmonically trapped cold atom systems: Few-body dynamics and application to many-body thermodynamics

Underlying the many-body effects of ultracold atomic gases are the few-body dynamics and interparticle interactions. Moreover, the study of few-body systems on their own has accelerated due to confining few atoms in each well of a deep optical lattice or in a single microtrap. This thesis studies the microscopic properties of few-body systems under external spherically symmetric harmonic confinement and how the few-body properties translate to the many-body system. Bosonic and fermionic few-body systems are considered and the dependence of the energetics and other quantities are investigated as functions of the s-wave scattering length, the mass ratio and the temperature. It is found that the condensate fraction of a weakly-interacting trapped Bose gas depletes quadratically with the s-wave scattering length. The next order term in the depletion depends not only, as might be expected naively, on the s-wave scattering length and the effective range but additionally on a two-body parameter that is not needed to reproduce the energy of weakly-interacting trapped Bose gases. This finding has important implications for effective field theory treatments of the system.;Weakly-interacting atomic and molecular two-component Fermi gases with equal masses are described using perturbative approaches. The energy shifts are tabulated and interpreted, and a measure of the molecular condensate fraction is developed. We develop a measure of the molecular condensate fraction using the two-body density matrix and we develop a model of the spherical component of the momentum distribution that agrees well with stochastic variational calculations. We establish the existence of intersystem degeneracies for equal mass two-component Fermi gases with zero-range interactions, where the eigen energies of the spin-imbalanced system are degenerate with a subset of the eigen energies of the more spin-balanced system and the same total number of fermions.;For unequal mass two-component Fermi gases with infinitely large interspecies scattering length, a theoretical framework that describes N-body resonances is developed. The microscopic energy spectra of the trapped two- and three-body systems with unequal masses is used to calculate the second- and third-order virial coefficients. The resulting virial equation of state is used to make the first predictions for the thermodynamic behavior of the normal phase strongly-interacting mass-imbalanced two-component Fermi gases. First predictions for the virial equation of state of bosonic and fermionic dipolar gases with equal masses are presented.