United Nations Educational, Scientific Organization and International Atomic Energy Agency THE ABDUS SALAM INTERNATIONAL CENTRE FOR THEORETICAL PHYSICS BOSON AND FERMION MANY-BODY ASSEMBLIES: FINGERPRINTS OF EXCITATIONS IN THE GROUND-STATE WAVE FUNCTIONS, WITH EXAMPLES OF SUPERFLUID 4 He AND THE HOMOGENEOUS CORRELATED ELECTRON LIQUID
Abdus Salam
After a brief summary of some basic properties of ideal gases of bosons and of fermions, two many-body Hamiltonians are cited for which ground-state wave functions allow the generation of excited states. But because of the complexity of ground-state many-body wave functions, we then consider properties of reduced density matrices, and in particular, the diagonal element of the second-order density matrix. For both the homogeneous correlated electron liquid and for an assembly of charged bosons, the ground-state pair correlation function g(r) has fingerprints of the zero-point energy of the plasmon modes. These affect crucially the static structure factor S(k), in the long wavelength limit. This is best understood by means of the Ornstein-Zernike direct correlation function c(r), which plays an important role throughout this article. Turning from such charged liquids, both boson and fermion, to superfluid 4 He, the elevated temperature (T) structure factor S(k, T) is related, albeit approximately, to its zero-temperature counterpart, via the velocity of sound, reflecting the collective phonon excitations, and the superfluid density. Finally some future directions are pointed.
•Jan 1, 2007•0 citations