A general system composed of many weakly interacting bosons and/or fermions is considered. The object is to develop a procedure for renormalizing the single-particle creation operators, so as to remove the interactions to successively higher orders of perturbation. The basic idea is that creation operators ${{\ensuremath{\theta}}_{i}}^{\ifmmode\dagger\else\textdagger\fi{}}$ must satisfy the Hamiltonian commutator equations $[\mathcal{H},{{\ensuremath{\theta}}_{i}}^{\ifmmode\dagger\else\textdagger\fi{}}]={\ensuremath{\omega}}_{i}{{\ensuremath{\theta}}_{i}}^{\ifmmode\dagger\else\textdagger\fi{}}$, where
H is the Hamiltonian and ${\ensuremath{\omega}}_{i}$ are the particle energies. For the many-weakly-interacting-particle system, the zeroth-order boson and fermion creation operators satisfy these equations to zeroth order. It is shown that if the creation operators are renormalized so as to satisfy the Hamiltonian commutator equations to order
m, and also to satisfy the appropriate boson commutators and fermion anticommutators to order
m, then the problem is solved to order
m. In particular, the vectors formed by operating on the ground state with the renormalized creation operators, according to the usual boson and fermion occupation-number representation, are eigenvectors of
H and are orthonormal, all to order
m. A procedure is otained for finding the (
m+1)-order contributions to the particle creation energies, in terms of the
m-order operators. Explicit first-order calculations of these general results are provided for a system of bosons and a system of fermions, and these first-order results are shown to include similar results of Rayleigh-Schr\"odinger perturbation theory, the random-phase approximation, and the method of thermodynamic Green's functions. The problem of anharmonic lattice dynamics is studied in detail, and a method of undetermined coefficients is used to renormalize the phonon creation operators to first order. The phonon energies are calculated to second order, and this calculation shows that the interactions between renormalized phonons cannot be removed in second order. Statistical averages of the phonon energies give the energy shifts and lifetimes which have been calculated previously by various propagator techniques. In addition, the renormalized energies are used to calculate the temperature-dependent part of the Helmholtz free energy correct to second order. As a final example, electron-phonon interactions in a normal metal are studied. The electron and phonon creation operators are renormalized to first order, the particle energies are calculated to second order, and statistical averages of the particle energies recover the usual thermodynamic Green's-function results for energy shifts and lifetimes. These examples show the simplicity by which the renormalization procedure obtains a great amount of detailed information about the single-particle nature of a many-particle system.
A many-boson model is formulated and expressions for its exact eigenstates and energies are obtained for both an arbitrary finite and an infinite number of bosons. The Hamiltonian of the model contains interactions between bosons whose momenta have equal magnitudes but opposite directions. The matrix elements of this interaction are taken to be a constant over a range of momenta surrounding k = 0. The ground state of the 2N-particle system is shown to be a product of N pair-creation operators acting on the vacuum state. Each of these pair-creation operators depends upon one of N parameters which are called pair energies. The N pair energies are shown to satisfy a coupled system of nonlinear algebraic equations. The energy of the state is the sum of the pair energies and the occupation probabilities of the single-particle levels are given as simple functions of the pair energies. Similar results are derived for the excited states of the system and for the states of an odd number of particles. These results are valid for both a repulsive and an attractive interaction, since they only depend upon the form of the interaction. The equations are solved algebraically for two model systems. The first of these is one whose single-particle kinetic energy takes on only one value. The equations for this system are solved for an arbitrary interaction strength and it is shown that the pair energies are proportional to the zeros of certain Laguerre polynomials. The second system is one in which the single-particle kinetic energy can take on two values. The equations for this system are solved in the strong repulsive-interaction limit and it is shown that the pair energies are proportional to the zeros of certain Jacobi polynomials. The excitation energies of this second system are shown to be proportional to 1/n and the occupations of the two single-particle levels in the ground state are shown to be proportional to n, where n is the total number of particles. For a repulsive interaction and an arbitrary single-particle spectrum, the algebraic equations for the pair energies are converted into an approximate integral equation for the density of roots which is accurate to order 1/n. This integral equation is solved for a strong interaction which, in the context of this model, means an interaction whose strength is greater than a constant times 1/V⅔ in the limit of a large volume. From this solution, the following results are obtained: (1) the lowest two single-particle levels have occupations of order n; (2) the excitation spectrum is that of a set of noninteracting quasiparticles; and (3) the quasiparticle spectrum has two zeros corresponding to the lowest two single-particle levels. Apart from the presence of two zeros, the quasiparticle spectrum does not differ significantly from that of the noninteracting particles.
The problem of a system of bosons at zero temperature, interacting via a strong short-ranged repulsive interaction and a weak long-ranged attraction, is treated by the methods of quantum-field theory. It is shown that if the parameters of the attractive part of the interaction are suitably restricted, an approximation to the self-energy parts of the Green's functions, similar to that used by Beliaev for the case of purely repulsive interactions, leads to an excitation spectrum which in the limit of small momenta represents phonons. The approximation also yields an
N-body bound state corresponding to zero pressure. Apart from minor differences, these results are in agreement with an earlier calculation of Huang.
In this paper properties of a boson gas at zero temperature are investigated by means of field-theoretic methods. Difficulties arising from the depletion of the ground state are resolved in a simple way by the elimination of the zero-momentum state. The result of this procedure when applied to the calculation of the Green's functions of the system is identical to that of Beliaev. It is then shown generally that for a repulsive interaction the energy
E(k) of a phonon of momentum k, which is found as the pole of a one-particle Green's function, approaches zero for zero momentum, which means that the phonon spectrum does not exhibit an energy gap.The Green's function method is applied to the calculation of the properties of a low-density boson gas. The next order term beyond that calculated by Lee and Yang, and Beliaev for the ground-state energy is obtained and the general form of the series expansion is found to be $(\frac{{E}_{0}}{\ensuremath{\Omega}})=\frac{1}{2}{n}^{2}{f}_{0}[1+a{(n{{f}_{0}}^{3})}^{\frac{1}{2}}+b(n{{f}_{0}}^{3})\mathrm{ln}n{{f}_{0}}^{3}+c(n{{f}_{0}}^{3})+d{(n{{f}_{0}}^{3})}^{\frac{3}{2}}\mathrm{ln}(n{{f}_{0}}^{3})+\ensuremath{\cdots}],$ where
n is the density and
f0 is the scattering length for the assumed two-body interaction between the bosons. The coefficients
a and
b are independent of the shape of the interaction, and are the only terms thus far calculated. The coefficient
b is in agreement with the hard-sphere gas calculations of Wu and of Sawada.A discussion is given of the intermediate-density calculation of Brueckner and Sawada, and certain possible improvements in the method of summing a selected set of higher-order terms are proposed.
A general nonperturbation problem, described by the Hamiltonian
H, is considered. Approximate creation operators ${{\ensuremath{\theta}}_{i}}^{\ifmmode\dagger\else\textdagger\fi{}}$ are defined as operators which satisfy the Hamiltonian commutator equations $[\mathcal{H},{{\ensuremath{\theta}}_{i}}^{\ifmmode\dagger\else\textdagger\fi{}}]={\ensuremath{\omega}}_{i}{{\ensuremath{\theta}}_{i}}^{\ifmmode\dagger\else\textdagger\fi{}}+{{R}_{i}}^{\ifmmode\dagger\else\textdagger\fi{}}$, where ${\ensuremath{\omega}}_{i}$ are the creation energies, and the remainder operators ${{R}_{i}}^{\ifmmode\dagger\else\textdagger\fi{}}$ are small in the sense that statistical averages involving the ${{R}_{i}}^{\ifmmode\dagger\else\textdagger\fi{}}$ are small. A zeroth approximation is to neglect the ${{R}_{i}}^{\ifmmode\dagger\else\textdagger\fi{}}$. In this case, a straight-forward derivation provides general relations between statistical averages such as $〈{{\ensuremath{\theta}}_{i}}^{\ifmmode\dagger\else\textdagger\fi{}}\ensuremath{\Omega}〉$ and $〈{{\ensuremath{\theta}}_{i}}^{\ifmmode\dagger\else\textdagger\fi{}}\ensuremath{\Omega}\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}\ensuremath{\Omega}{{\ensuremath{\theta}}_{i}}^{\ifmmode\dagger\else\textdagger\fi{}}〉$, where $\ensuremath{\Omega}$ is any operator. The usual boson and fermion occupation numbers are a trivial result of these zeroth-order relations. Corrections to the general zeroth-order relations arise from the ${{R}_{i}}^{\ifmmode\dagger\else\textdagger\fi{}}$; such corrections are considered in the spirit of perturbation theory. An explicit first-order correction is obtained for the averages $〈{{\ensuremath{\theta}}_{i}}^{\ifmmode\dagger\else\textdagger\fi{}}{\ensuremath{\theta}}_{i}〉$, and this correction is related to a self-consistent energy-renormalization procedure. The present method is similar to the method of thermodynamic Green's functions in that the derivations given here do not require evaluation of any state vectors or of the partition function. The general results are applied to the Heisenberg ferromagnet problem. At low temperatures, the zeroth-order relations give the Bloch spin-wave results, and an approximate evaluation of the first-order contribution gives the leading term in Dyson's
T4 correction to the spontaneous magnetization. For arbitrary temperatures, the zeroth-order relations give the Tyablikov equations for
〈Sz〉, and Callen's results are obtained from the first-order corrections. These examples illustrate the simplicity of calculating statistical averages of functions of the ${{\ensuremath{\theta}}_{i}}^{\ifmmode\dagger\else\textdagger\fi{}}$, ${\ensuremath{\theta}}_{i}$ operators by the present method.