This paper presents a conserving gapless mean-field theory for weakly interacting Bose gases. We first construct a mean-field Luttinger-Ward thermodynamic functional in terms of the condensate wave function
Ψ and the Nambu Green's function
G^ for the quasiparticle field. Imposing its stationarity respect to
Ψ and
G^ yields a set of equations to determine the equilibrium for general non-uniform systems. They have a plausible property of satisfying the Hugenholtz-Pines theorem to provide a gapless excitation spectrum. Also, the corresponding dynamical equations of motion obey various conservation laws. Thus, the present mean-field theory shares two important properties with the exact theory: ``conserving'' and ``gapless.'' The theory is then applied to a homogeneous weakly interacting Bose gas with s-wave scattering length
a and particle mass
m to clarify its basic thermodynamic properties under two complementary conditions of constant density
n and constant pressure
p. The superfluid transition is predicted to be first-order because of the non-analytic nature of the order-parameter expansion near
Tc inherent in Bose systems, i.e., the Landau-Ginzburg expansion is not possible here. The transition temperature
Tc shows quite a different interaction dependence between the
n-fixed and
p-fixed cases. In the former case
Tc increases from the ideal gas value
T0 as
Tc/T0=1+2.33an1/3, whereas it decreases in the latter as
Tc/T0=1−3.84a(mp/2πℏ2)1/5. Temperature dependences of basic thermodynamic quantities are clarified explicitly.
We derive and discuss the equations of motion for the condensate and its fluctuations for a dilute, weakly interacting Bose gas in an external potential within the self-consistent Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov (HFB) approximation. Account is taken of the depletion of the condensate and the anomalous Bose correlations, which are important at finite temperatures. We give a critical analysis of the self-consistent HFB approximation in terms of the Hohenberg-Martin classification of approximations (conserving vs gapless) and point out that the Popov approximation to the full HFB gives a gapless single-particle spectrum at all temperatures. The Beliaev second-order approximation is discussed as the spectrum generated by functional differentiation of the HFB single-particle Green's function. We emphasize that the problem of determining the excitation spectrum of a Bose-condensed gas (homogeneous or inhomogeneous) is difficult because of the need to satisfy several different constraints.
In Chapter 3, we have shown how a Bose condensate leads to the single-particle Green's function G αβ ( Q , ω) appearing as a distinct component of the the dynamic structure factor S ( Q , ω). This feature is a direct consequence of (3.13) and is explicitly shown by the expression for S ( Q , ω) in (3.18). In the present chapter, we review the many-body diagrammatic analysis which specifies the precise relation between G αβ ( Q , ω) and S ( Q , ω) in a Bose-condensed fluid ( n 0 ≠ 0). The power of this “dielectric formalism” lies in showing that both functions mirror each other, as a result of the condensate-induced intermixing of single-particle and density excitations. At the same time, the formalism emphasizes the continuity of these excitations as the fluid passes through T λ, although these excitations have very temperature-dependent weights in G αβ ( Q , ω) and S ( Q , ω). While it is the poles of the single-particle Green's function which describe the elementary excitations, experimentally it is difficult to probe directly this field-fluctuation spectrum. In particular, it is only in a Bose-condensed fluid that one can obtain information about G αβ ( Q , ω) from inelastic neutron-scattering data on S ( Q , ω). In the absence of a condensate, there is little relation between the density-fluctuation modes and the single-particle excitations in a Bose fluid. After setting up the dielectric formalism in Section 5.1, the next two sections consider some model approximations at finite temperatures. These models are most appropriate to a dilute weakly interacting Bose gas (WIDBG), but we believe they also give crucial insight into various aspects of superfluid 4 He.
Quantum-field-theoretic descriptions of interacting condensed bosons have suffered from the lack of self-consistent approximation schemes satisfying Goldstone's theorem and dynamical conservation laws simultaneously. We present a procedure to construct such approximations systematically by using either an exact relation for the interaction energy or the Hugenholtz-Pines relation to express the thermodynamic potential in a Luttinger-Ward form. Inspection of the self-consistent perturbation expansion up to the third order with respect to the interaction shows that the two relations yield a unique identical result at each order, reproducing the conserving-gapless mean-field theory [T. Kita, J. Phys. Soc. Jpn. 74, 1891 (2005)] as the lowest-order approximation. The uniqueness implies that the series becomes exact when infinite terms are retained. We also derive useful expressions for the entropy and superfluid density in terms of Green's function and a set of real-time dynamical equations to describe thermalization of the condensate.
The theory of non-interacting Bose gases is supplemented by a numerical quantum field description with a two-dimensional non-local order parameter that allows the modeling of wave-like atomic correlations and interference effects in the limit of low atomic densities. From the present model, it is possible to explain symmetry aspects of non-interacting and very weakly interacting Bose gases in the limit of fluctuating particle numbers, like the forward propagation of time and the relation to the breaking and preservation of phase gauge symmetry in solids. In the present formalism, the propagation of one-directional time arises from the pre-defined and equivalent convergence of independent quantum fields towards the Boltzmann equilibrium, and it is shown that Glauber coherent states are related to the definition of the quantized field. Coherently coupling condensate and non-condensate parts as a direct consequence of the increasing quantum coherence time between the different quantum field components in the Bose gas from cooling to below the critical temperature, the present model describes symmetry breaking, which is originally known from the definition of a specific gauge field from Elitzur's theorem for local gauge fields, as a global physical rather than a purely formal mathematical process.
We formulate a conserving gapless mean-field theory for Bose-Einstein condensates on the basis of a Luttinger-Ward thermodynamic functional. It is applied to a weakly interacting uniform gas with density
n and s-wave scattering length
a to clarify its fundamental thermodynamic properties. It is found that the condensation here occurs as a first-order transition. The shift of the transition temperature
ΔTc from the ideal-gas result
T0 is positive and given to the leading order by
ΔTc=2.33an1/3T0, in agreement with a couple of previous estimates. The theory is expected to form a new theoretical basis for trapped Bose-Einstein condensates at finite temperatures.