Within the impulse approximation, the response of a many-body system at large momentum transfer can be directly related to ground state properties. Although the physics assumptions underlying impulse approximation are well defined, their implementation involves ambiguities that may cause significant differences in the calculated responses. We show that, while minimal use of the impulse approximation assumptions naturally leads to write the response in terms of the spectral function, the alternative definition in terms of the momentum distribution involves a more extended use of the same assumptions.
This paper shows the necessity of introducing a quantum object, the ``coboson,'' to properly describe, through a fermion scheme, any composite particle, such as the exciton, which is made of two fermions. Although commonly dealt with as elementary bosons, these composite bosons---cobosons in short---differ from them due to their composite nature which makes the handling of their many-body effects quite different from the existing treatments valid for elementary bosons. As a direct consequence of this composite nature, there is no correct way to describe the interaction between cobosons as a potential
V. This is rather dramatic because, with the Hamiltonian not written as
H=H0+V, all the usual approaches to many-body effects fail. In particular, the standard form of the Fermi golden rule, written in terms of
V, cannot be used to obtain the transition rates of two cobosons. To get them, we have had to construct an unconventional expression for this Fermi golden rule in which
H only appears. Making use of this expression, we give here a detailed calculation of the time evolution of two excitons. We compare the results of this exact approach with the ones obtained by using an effective bosonic Hamiltonian in which the excitons are considered as elementary bosons with effective scatterings between them, these scatterings resulting from an elaborate mapping between the two-fermion space and the ideal boson space. We show that the relation between the inverse lifetime and the sum of the transition rates for elementary bosons differs from the one of the composite bosons by a factor of
1∕2, so that it is impossible to find effective scatterings between bosonic excitons giving these two physical quantities correctly, whatever the mapping from composite bosons to elementary bosons is. The present paper thus constitutes a strong mathematical proof that, in spite of a widely spread belief, we cannot forget the composite nature of these cobosons, even in the extremely low-density limit of just two excitons. This paper also shows the (unexpected) cancellation in the Born approximation of the two-exciton transition rate for a finite value of the momentum transfer.
Recent calculations with an effective isospin-dependent contact interaction show the possibility of the crossover from superfluidity of neutron Cooper pairs in the
1S0 pairing channel to Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of di-neutron bound states in dilute nuclear matter. The density and spin correlation functions are calculated for a di-neutron condensate in asymmetric nuclear matter with the aim of finding the possible features of the BCS-BEC crossover. It is shown that the zero-momentum transfer spin correlation function satisfies the sum rule at zero temperature. In symmetric nuclear matter, the density correlation function changes sign at low momentum transfer across the BCS-BEC transition, and this feature can be considered as a signature of the crossover. At finite isospin asymmetry, this criterion gives too large a value for the critical asymmetry ${\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{c}^{d}~0.9$, at which the BEC state is quenched. Therefore, it can be trusted for the description of the density-driven BCS-BEC crossover of neutron pairs only at small isospin asymmetry. This result generalizes the conclusion of the study in Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 090402 (2005), where the change of sign of the density correlation function at low momentum transfer in two-component quantum fermionic atomic gas with the balanced populations of fermions of different species was considered as an unambiguous signature of the BCS-BEC transition.
For a quantum system of identical fermions a partition of the density-density correlation function in its ``self'' and ``distinct'' part is presented. These quantities show different properties than their classical counterparts, e.g., they violate the ``detailed balance'' and are not necessarily real. Nevertheless it can be expected that they will provide a good tool for a better description of the self-motion in many-particle systems and are therefore investigated in second-order perturbation theory of the interparticle potential.