Beyond the Tonks-Girardeau Gas: Strongly Correlated Regime in Quasi-One-Dimensional Bose Gases

We consider a homogeneous 1D Bose gas with contact interactions and a large attractive coupling constant. This system can be realized in tight waveguides by exploiting a confinement induced resonance of the effective 1D scattering amplitude. By using the diffusion Monte Carlo method we show that, for small densities, the gaslike state is well described by a gas of hard rods. The critical density for cluster formation is estimated using the variational Monte Carlo method. The behavior of the correlation functions and of the frequency of the lowest breathing mode for harmonically trapped systems shows that the gas is more strongly correlated than in the Tonks-Girardeau regime.