Physical Review A
van der Waals limit of an interacting Bose gas in a weak external field
Philip de Smedt, Valentin Anatol'evich Zagrebnov
Abstract
We study how the introduction of a two-body interaction changes the thermodynamic properties of the free Bose gas in a weak (scaled) external field. We show that, in the van der Waals limit, the thermodynamic pressure always is a ${C}^{\ensuremath{\infty}}$ function of the density in one and two dimensions, while this is not so in higher dimensions. The phase transition to the superfluid phase in the latter case is discussed in more detail by looking at the local densities. We also show that the van der Waals limit for this system does not correspond to the usual mean-field approximation.