This article reviews recent advances in the theory of the three-dimensional dilute homogeneous Bose gas at zero and finite temperature. Effective-field-theory methods are used to formulate a systematic perturbative framework that can be used to calculate the properties of a system at T=0. The perturbative expansion of these properties is essentially an expansion in the gas parameter na3, where a is the s-wave scattering length and n is the number density. In particular, the leading quantum corrections to the ground-state energy density, the condensate depletion, and long-wavelength collective excitations are rederived in an efficient and economical manner. Nonuniversal effects are also discussed. These effects are higher-order corrections that depend on properties of the interatomic potential other than the scattering length, such as the effective range. The article critically examines various approaches to the dilute Bose gas in equilibrium at finite temperature. These include the Bogoliubov approximation, the Popov approximation, the Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov approximation, the \ensuremath{\Phi}-derivable approach, optimized perturbation theory, and renormalization-group techniques. The article ends with a look at recent calculations of the critical temperature of the dilute Bose gas, which include 1/N techniques, lattice simulations, self-consistent calculations, and variational perturbation theory.
The properties of the uniform Bose gas are studied within the optimized variational perturbation theory (Gaussian approximation) in a self-consistent way. It is shown that the atomic Bose-Einstein condensate with a repulsive interaction becomes unstable when the gas parameter $\ensuremath{\gamma}=\ensuremath{\rho}{a}^{3}$ exceeds a critical value ${\ensuremath{\gamma}}_{crit}\ensuremath{\approx}0.01$. The quantum corrections beyond the Bogoliubov-Popov approximation to the energy density, chemical potential, and pressure in powers of $\sqrt{\ensuremath{\gamma}}$ expansions are presented.