The method developed in the previous paper for the treatment of the quantum-mechanical
N-body hard-sphere problem is applied to a calculation of the grand partition function of an imperfect Bose gas with hard-sphere interactions. The grand partition function is calculated to second order in an expansion in powers of $\frac{a}{\ensuremath{\lambda}}$, where
a is the hard-sphere diameter and $\ensuremath{\lambda}$ the thermal wavelength. The approximate equation of state for the gas phase is thereby obtained by calculating all the virial coefficients to order ${(\frac{a}{\ensuremath{\lambda}})}^{2}$.The first-order energy levels obtained in the previous paper embody some interesting physical properties. A fictitious system with exactly such energy levels is considered. The partition function for such a system can be calculated exactly and the exact equation of state obtained. It is shown that there is a phase transition, which more closely resembles an ordinary gas-liquid transition than the Bose-Einstein condensation.
It is shown by a rigorous development from first principles that a relatively simple form for the partition function of an imperfect Bose-Einstein gas can be obtained. This form is that of a
3N-dimensional integral (
N being the total number of particles) the integrand of which can be completely determined for any given interparticle interaction provided certain, in general small, many-body quantum mechanical effects are ignored. The final evaluation of the partition function in closed form requires that this integrand be approximated by functions sufficiently tractable that the
3N-dimensional integral can be performed.
The exactness of the Bogoliubov approximation is discussed from the point of view of the condensation properties of the Bose gas. For the imperfect Bose gas, the authors find that the approximation yields the correct condensate density when the thermodynamic limit is taken by isotropic dilation; this is not the case in general for other ways of going to the infinite volume limit. They also prove the existence of Bose-Einstein condensation for a class of Bose gases with weak interactions and an energy gap.
The partition function of a dilute Bose gas with repulsive interaction, fixed number of particles and in the presence of a condensate is computed up to first order in the interactions. An equilibrium condition appears for the fraction of particles in the condensate and the chemical potential of the particles. We show that for a dilute gas the Bose–Einstein transition is not of second order. Moreover, the thermodynamical quantities obtained may look different from those in the literature, because the chemical potential enters in a nontrivial way in the quasi particle spectrum.
This chapter focuses on integrating the distribution function over all the states of conserved Bosons to obtain a relation between particle density and the chemical potential. It describes the phenomenon of Bose-Einstein condensation in a perfect boson gas. The chapter discusses the experimental observation of Bose-Einstein condensation in perfect gases. There are two routes to obtaining Bose-Einstein condensation in a perfect gas. One is to reduce the mass of the particle, thus reducing critical density to a low value at a reasonable temperature. The other route is to lower the temperature to the point where the critical density is so low that the particles are too far apart to interact with each other.
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
L2-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.
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