To facilitate the study of thermal properties of the pairing model, an approach based on the grand canonical ensemble is numerically compared with one based on the canonical ensemble. At low temperature in the phase of pair condensation, their difference becomes significant, in particular with regard to the behavior depending on whether the total number of fermions is even or odd. We separate the grand canonical ensemble into two pieces: one containing systems with even numbers of particles and one containing systems with odd numbers of particles. The grand partition functions defined on such grand canonical ensembles faithfully reproduce the even-odd effect.
In order to compare the approach of the mixed state representation of the pairing model with the exact evaluation of the grand partition function, we introduce the fermion space of a grand canonical ensemble. For the definition of the grand partition function, we adopt a quasi-spin space and evaluate its multiplicity. then we show how to derive the mixed state representation, which yields results that are approximately the same as those of the thermal Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov theory for the thermal equilibrium state, from the grand partition function under the mean field approximation. We compare numerical results of the mean field approximation with those obtained from the exact evaluation of the grand partition function. We find that the mean field approximation gives good results. However, we find a distinctive difference between the two sets of results in the condensed phase.
Wick's theorem for the expectation values of products of field operators for a system of noninteracting fermions or bosons plays an important role in the perturbative approach to the quantum many-body problem. A finite-temperature version holds in the framework of the grand canonical ensemble, but not for the canonical ensemble appropriate for systems with fixed particle number such as ultracold quantum gases in optical lattices. Here we present formulas for expectation values of products of field operators in the canonical ensemble using a method in the spirit of Gaudin's proof of Wick's theorem for the grand canonical case. The deviations from Wick's theorem are examined quantitatively for two simple models of noninteracting fermions.
In a previous paper, referred to as I, we developed a new approach for the description of thermal effects in the Lipkin model. In order to clarify the physical ingredient of this approach, we introduce the grand partition function of the present system. We compare numerically the results from these two approaches and show that they nearly coincide, except for the region near the transition temperature. Further, we show that our approach is equivalent to that based on the grand partition function under the mean field approximation.
We derive an expression for the reduced density matrices of ideal Bose and Fermi gases in the canonical ensemble, which corresponds to the Bloch--De Dominicis (or Wick's) theorem in the grand canonical ensemble for normal-ordered products of operators. Using this expression, we study one- and two-body correlations of homogeneous ideal gases with
N particles. The pair distribution function
g(2)(r) of fermions clearly exhibits antibunching with
g(2)(0)=0 due to the Pauli exclusion principle at all temperatures, whereas that of normal bosons shows bunching with
g(2)(0)≈2, corresponding to the Hanbury Brown--Twiss effect. For bosons below the Bose--Einstein condensation temperature
T0, an off-diagonal long-range order develops in the one-particle density matrix to reach
g(1)(r)=1 at
T=0, and the pair correlation starts to decrease towards
g(2)(r)≈1 at
T=0. The results for
N→∞ are seen to converge to those of the grand canonical ensemble obtained by assuming the average
⟨ψ^(r)⟩ of the field operator
ψ^(r) below
T0. This fact justifies the introduction of the "anomalous" average
⟨ψ^(r)⟩=0 below
T0 in the grand canonical ensemble as a mathematical means of removing unphysical particle-number fluctuations to reproduce the canonical results in the thermodynamic limit.