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Journal de physique

Particle vs. pair condensation in attractive Bose liquids

Ph. Nozières, D. Saint James

Published Jan 1, 1982• 258 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The competition between particle and pair condensation in Bose liquids is studied using a mean field variational ground state that comprises both the Bogoliubov approximation for weakly interacting Bose gases and the Valatin-Butler pair state. We first consider structureless bosons, disregarding the fact that an attractive gas will necessarily collapse. We show that a pair state occurs only if the attraction is strong enough to bind two bosons together. The limit of low densities is treated exactly. At higher density, we use a separable interaction model and we show that the pairs dissociate at a critical density Nc (where their ionization gap vanishes). Past that threshold, ordinary particle condensation sets in. In order to cure collapse, we consider bosons with an internal spin structure : the interaction is binding in some states, repulsive on the average. Taking spin 1 particles as an example, we repeat the previous analysis, and we substantiate its conclusions while retaining a positive compressibility. In the pair regime the ground state is isotropic (singlet pairs). Past the dissociation threshold, an anisotropic one particle condensate appears. We show that it is linearly polarized (in an arbitrary direction), and non fragmented. We discuss briefly its physical properties, and we suggest that the transition from pair to particle condensation might be first order.

DOI
10.1051/jphys:019820043070113300

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The competition between particle and pair condensation in Bose liquids is studied using a mean field variational ground state that comprises both the Bogoliubov approximation for weakly interacting Bose gases and the Valatin-Butler pair state. We first consider structureless bosons, disregarding the fact that an attractive gas will necessarily collapse. We show that a pair state occurs only if the attraction is strong enough to bind two bosons together. The limit of low densities is treated exactly. At higher density, we use a separable interaction model and we show that the pairs dissociate at a critical density Nc (where their ionization gap vanishes). Past that threshold, ordinary particle condensation sets in. In order to cure collapse, we consider bosons with an internal spin structure : the interaction is binding in some states, repulsive on the average. Taking spin 1 particles as an example, we repeat the previous analysis, and we substantiate its conclusions while retaining a positive compressibility. In the pair regime the ground state is isotropic (singlet pairs). Past the dissociation threshold, an anisotropic one particle condensate appears. We show that it is linearly polarized (in an arbitrary direction), and non fragmented. We discuss briefly its physical properties, and we suggest that the transition from pair to particle condensation might be first order.
The ground state of a system of interacting Bose particles is examined by a pair-correlation variational method based on exact eigenstates of the total particle number, without assuming macroscopic occupation of the single-particle state k = 0 (``simple'' Bose condensation). Known results are recovered in the case of repulsive interactions of weak and intermediate strengths, where the ground state does in fact exhibit simple condensation. But it is shown that in the case of weak attractive interactions the ground state exhibits ``generalized'' condensation, in which a finite fraction of particles have momenta which are macroscopically negligible, but no one single-particle state is macroscopically occupied. A weak-coupling expansion is derived for the ground-state energy in this case, the leading term of which is three times as low as that of the state one would obtain in the case of simple condensation. By the use of a pseudopotential, this result is adapted to the case of a strongly interacting system with a small negative scattering length α and fixed low density ρ, giving E0/n=−(6π ℏ2 ρ | α | /m)[1−(128/45) π−1/2(ρ | α | 3)1/2+…]. The relationships between equilibrium density, ground-state energy, and sound velocity predicted by this expression are in order-of-magnitude agreement with those obtaining for liquid He4.
Quantum systems consisting of many particles are both interesting from the physics and the mathematics perspective. One aspect that makes them fascinating from the physics point of view is that they can exhibit quantum effects on macroscopic scales such as Bose-Einstein condensation. This phenomenon, first predicted 100 years ago by Bose [19] and Einstein [44], occurs when a dilute gas of bosons is cooled down to very low temperatures. Below a certain critical temperature a condensate forms, meaning that a macroscopic fraction of the particles is in the same one-particle state, and thus, quantum phenomena become relevant on length scales much larger than the individual atom. The occurrence of Bose-Einstein condensation is also related to superfluidity as suggested in [88]. Bose-Einstein condensation has been achieved experimentally independently by the groups of Cornell and Wieman [3] and Ketterle [40] earning them a Nobel prize in 2001. While Bose and Einstein analyzed theoretically the non-interacting gas, an effective theory describing weakly interacting Bose gases was proposed by Bogoliubov in 1947 with the goal of explaining the occurrence of superfluidity in liquid helium [18]. Using assumptions such as that condensation indeed occurs, his theory yields predictions for the low-energy states of the system. Seen from the mathematics perspective, describing the Bose gas is an interesting challenge due to the strong correlations between particles introduced by the interaction making this case much harder to study than the non-interacting one. In particular, a proof that Bose-Einstein condensation occurs in the thermodynamic limit for continuous systems is still out of reach. However, there has been a lot of work regarding the rigorous analysis of bosonic systems in various relevant regimes. This thesis contains three new contributions establishing rigorous results on bosonic systems in different, physically relevant settings. It is based on the articles [37, 27, 31]. The first result concerns the time-evolution of initially trapped Bose gases in the ultra-dilute Gross-Pitaevskii regime. Under some assumptions on the initial data satisfied in particular by a class of states that are expected to approximate the ground state in a trap, we derive a quasi-free approximation that is close to the true solution in L2L^2L2-norm. In particular, we show that this approximate wave function is described in terms of a Bose-Einstein condensate in a one-particle state following the time-dependent Gross-Pitaevskii equation together with pair excitations with respect to this condensate. As a corollary, we establish a central limit theorem for bounded one-particle observables. The second result is a simple proof of Bose-Einstein condensation for interacting, ultra-dilute gases. More specifically, we consider scalings interpolating between the Gross-Pitaevskii regime and the thermodynamic limit. While condensation had been shown to hold in these regimes before, the advantage of the method used here is its simplicity. Lastly, the third result establishes an upper bound on the ground state energy of a dilute Bose gas in the thermodynamic limit. It captures rigorously the third order correction to the energy per unit volume for sufficiently low densities as predicted in the physics literature first by Wu and subsequently others. Full-text embargoed until: 2026-01-01\textit{Full-text embargoed until: 2026-01-01}Full-text embargoed until: 2026-01-01
One considers the superfluid (SF) state of a Bose liquid with a strong repulsion between bosons, in which at T=0, along with a weak single-particle Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), there exists an intensive pair coherent condensate (PCC), analogous to the Cooper condensate in a Fermi liquid with an attraction between the fermions. Such a PCC emerges in a system of bosons due to an oscillating sign-changing momentum dependence of the Fourier component of the pair interaction potential, which is characteristic of a certain family of repulsion potentials. In such cases, the Fourier component is negative in some domain of nonzero momentum transfer, which corresponds to an effective attraction. The collective effects of renormalization (``screening'') of the initial interaction lead to a suppression of the repulsion and an enhancement of the effective attraction. It is the ratio of the BEC density to the full density of the liquid n0/n≪1n_0/n\ll 1n0​/n≪1 that is used as a small parameter---unlike in the Bogolyubov theory for a quasi-ideal Bose gas, in which the small parameter is the ratio of the number of supracondensate excitations to the number of particles in an intensive BEC, (n−n0)/n0≪1(n-n_0)/n_0\ll 1(n−n0​)/n0​≪1. A closed system of nonlinear integral equations for the normal and anomalous self-energy parts is obtained, in the framework of a renormalized perturbation theory built on combined hydrodynamic and field variables. In the framework of the hard-spheres model, a spectrum of quasiparticles is obtained, which is in good accordance with the experimental spectrum of elementary excitations in superfluid 4^44He. The question of applicability of the Landau criterion in the absence of quantum vortices is discussed.
A self-consistent model of the superfluid (SF) state of a Bose liquid with strong interaction between bosons is considered, in which at T=0, along with a weak single-particle Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), there exists an intensive pair coherent condensate (PCC) of bosons, analogous to the Cooper pair condensate of fermions. Such a PCC emerges due to an effective attraction between bosons in some regions of momentum space, which results from an oscillating sign-changing momentum dependence of the Fourier component V(p) of the interaction potential. The collective many-body effects of renormalization ("screening") of the initial interaction, which are described by the bosonic polarization operator Π(p,ω), lead to a suppression of the repulsion [V(p)>0] and an enhancement of the effective attraction [V(p)<0] in the respective domains of nonzero momentum transfer. The ratio of the BEC density n_0 to the total particle density n of the Bose liquid is used as a small parameter of the model. A closed system of nonlinear integral equations for the normal and anomalous self-energy parts is obtained with account for the terms of first order in the BEC density. In the framework of the ``soft spheres'' model with the single fitting parameter--the value of the repulsion potential at r=0, a theoretical quasiparticle spectrum E(p) is obtained, which is in good accordance with the experimental spectrum E_{exp}(p) of elementary excitations in superfluid 4^44He.
The paradoxes and disparities in the contemporary microscopic theory of superfluid helium (He–II) are discussed along with possible ways of resolving them by taking pair correlations of He4 atoms into consideration. It is shown that most paradoxes are associated with the commonly accepted initial assumption concerning the dominating role of single-particle Bose condensate (SPBC) in the quantum microstructure of the superfluid component ρs. The existence of intensive SPBC leads to a strong hybridization of the elementary excitation branches and to a common dispersion law for all boson branches, which is identified with the quasiparticle spectrum E(p) observed experimentally from slow neutron scattering in liquid helium. However, the stability of this spectrum during a transition through the λ-point and the large value of the gap in the vicinity of the “rotonic” minimum contradict both the Landau theoretical criterion of superfluidity and the small value of experimentally measured critical velocity. At the same time, a strong interaction between particles in the Bose liquid He4 strongly suppresses the SPBC which amounts to less than 1% of all He4 atoms and hence cannot be the main constituent of the superfluid component, unlike the case of a weakly nonideal Bose gas. Moreover, for a quite strong attraction between particles in a certain region of the momentum space, bound pairs of bosons can be formed in the superfluid Bose liquid, and a coherent pair condensate (CPC) analogous to the Cooper pair condensate in superconductors may appear. Such a strong CPC may completely suppress the weak SPBC. In this case, the one-particle spectrum ε(p) of elementary excitations does not hybridize with the collective (two-particle) spectrum and does not appear in the structure of the dynamic form factor S(p,ε), i.e., does not coincide with the spectrum measured from neutron scattering. The dispersion of one-particle spectrum is defined by the momentum dependence of the pair order parameter Ψ̃(p) and may have a minimum or a point of inflection at p≠0. This peculiarity in the one-particle spectrum of a Bose liquid with CPC but without SPBC vanishes together with Ψ̃(p) at the temperature Tc=Tλ of the phase transition from the superfluid to the normal state (unlike the rotonic minimum in the collective spectrum), while the corresponding critical velocity vc=min[ε(p)/p] vanishes at the λ-point in accordance with the Landau criterion and the experimental data. The assumption that the strong “Cooper-like” CPC is responsible for the quantum structure of the superfluid component ρs is confirmed indirectly by the successful application of the Justrow approximation (based on strong pair correlations) for describing the properties of liquid He4 and quantum liquid mixtures He3–4He on one hand, and by an anomalously large effective mass of He3 impurity atoms in He4, which is approximately equal to total mass of He3 and He4 atoms, thus pointing to the existence of helium atoms in superfluid liquid He–II. The value of the superfluid velocity circulation quantum in the Onsager–Feynman vortices in a Bose liquid with CPC but without SPBC is discussed as well as the critical velocities of superfluid He4 in ultrathin films and channels in which the creation and motion of quantum vortices are ruled out, and the quasiparticle spectrum undergoes dimensional quantization.
We study the thermodynamic behavior of attractive binary Bose mixtures using exact path-integral Monte Carlo methods. Our focus is on the regime of interspecies interactions where the ground state is in a self-bound liquid phase, stabilized by beyond mean-field effects. We calculate the isothermal curves in the pressure vs density plane for different values of the attraction strength and establish the extent of the coexistence region between liquid and vapor using the Maxwell construction. Notably, within the coexistence region, Bose-Einstein condensation occurs in a discontinuous way as the density jumps from the normal gas to the superfluid liquid phase. Furthermore, we determine the critical point where the line of first-order transition ends and investigate the behavior of the density discontinuity in its vicinity. We also point out that the density discontinuity at the transition could be observed in experiments of mixtures in traps.