A many-body pseudopotential for a hard-sphere system which is mathematically equivalent to the boundary conditions imposed on the wave functions is obtained as a generalization of Huang and Yang's binary pseudopotential, and the lowest order term of the ground state energy resulting from the triple collision is calculated for the Bose system. Instead of the direct perturbational treatment of the pseudopotential, the use of the ρk-representation for the Bose system is proposed and the ground state energy is calculated in this representation. It is shown that the energy thus calculated is of the form of an expansion in powers of (ρa3)1/2, where ρ is the average density and a the hard-sphere diameter, which is agreement with Lee and Yang's conclusion drawn from the binary collision expansion method. Some discussions associated with the roton spectrum of liquid He4 are given.
The impurity excitation spectrum is calculated for the hard-sphere Bose gas with dilute impurity concentration, using the pseudopotential method of Lee, Huang, and Yang. The spectrum for the ideal case, in which the mass and interaction of impurity are the same with those of the bosons in the gas, is k2 in the unit of 2ma = h/ = 1 (ma being the mass of boson, and k the momentum of impurity), with an effective mass correction of −6445[(ρa3)12/π12]k2+O[(ρa3)k2,k4], where ρ is the density of the boson gas, and a is the hard-sphere diameter of the boson. The general impurity case is also calculated and found to have an impurity spectrum rk2, with a similar effective mass correction, where r is the mass ratio of the boson to the impurity.
A method developed by the authors for treating Bose-Einstein particles at low temperature is specialized to the case of hard sphere interactions. It is shown that the integral equations determining the energy can in this case be replaced by an integral involving the unknown excitation spectrum. The energy is first determined as a power series in ${(\ensuremath{\rho}{a}^{3})}^{\frac{1}{2}}$, where $\ensuremath{\rho}$ is the density and
a the hard-sphere radius. This solution is shown to diverge badly at high density. A result is then obtained which is valid over the full range of density, reducing to the exact expressions at low density and to a good approximation at high density. The excitation spectrum of the system is shown to have a peculiar nonmonotonic relation between energy and momentum very similar to that deduced by Landau from the low-temperature properties of
He4.
The system under consideration is an
N-particle quantum-mechanical system enclosed in a volume
V, in which the particles interact via two-body hard-sphere potentials, with hard-sphere diameter
a. The two-body hard-sphere problem is first discussed by a generalization of Fermi's pseudopotential by means of which the problem is formulated entirely in terms of the scattering phase shifts. It is then shown that a pseudopotential for the
N-body problem can be introduced, and leads to an expansion of the energy levels of the system in powers of
a. The first order energy levels of a Bose and a Fermi system are calculated. For the Bose system, the first order energy formula exhibits an "energy gap" above the ground state, leading to properties of the system not dissimilar to that of a superfluid. The ground state energy for a Bose system is calculated to order
a3 and that for the Fermi system, to order
a2. The physical interpretation and validity of these results are discussed.
The properties of a hard-sphere, Bose–Einstein gas are investigated numerically in the t-matrix, ladder approximation, using both the coordinate-space treatment of Brueckner and Sawada, as modified by Parry and ter Haar, and the pseudopotential method of Liu and Wong. For each treatment, the form of the excitation spectrum and the thermodynamic properties of the gas at low temperatures are compared with the corresponding properties of liquid helium. The pseudopotential method gives better agreement for a reasonable choice of the radius of the "hard-core" interaction. This result is not surprising since the actual potential corresponding to the pseudopotential of Liu and Wong is intermediate between the "soft-core" potential of Brueckner and Sawada and a true "hard-core" potential.