A renormalization-group method is developed with which thermodynamic properties of a weakly interacting, finite-size Bose gas can be investigated. Thereby effects originating from a confining potential are taken into account by periodic boundary conditions and by treating the resulting discrete energy levels of the confined degrees of freedom properly. The resulting density of states modifies the flow equations of the renormalization group in momentum space. It is shown that as soon as the characteristic length of confinement becomes comparable to the thermal wavelength of a weakly interacting and trapped Bose gas its thermodynamic properties are changed significantly. This is exemplified by investigating characteristic bunching properties of the interacting Bose gas which manifest themselves in the second-order coherence factor.
The renormalization group is not only a powerful method for describing universal properties of phase transitions but it is also useful for evaluating non-universal thermodynamic properties beyond meanfield theory. In this contribution we concentrate on these latter aspects of the renormalization group approach. We introduce its main underlying ideas in the familiar context of the ideal Bose gas and then apply them to the case of an interacting, confined Bose gas within the framework of the random phase approximation. We model confinement by periodic boundary conditions and demonstrate how confinement modifies the flow equations of the renormalization group changing thus the The recent experimental realization of Bose-Einstein condensation has renewed the interest in the study of trapped, dilute, weakly interacting Bose gases. Despite the long history of this subject there still exist unresolved
In this thesis we study the dimensional crossover of a nonrelativistic Bose gas with pointlike repulsive interactions. Our focus is on the dimensional crossover from two to three dimensions, which is of particular relevance in ultracold experiments. Both the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional Bose gas feature a phase transition to a superfluid state. We investigate how the phase transition temperature changes as a function of the spatial extent of the transverse dimension, which is confined in a potential well with periodic boundary conditions. For these calculations we employ Functional Renormalization Group equations. Further, we relate the 3D and 2D s-wave scattering lengths and show how the lower-dimensional system inherits its properties from the higher-dimensional system during the renormalization group flow. In these calculations we introduce the crossover function, which is of central importance in the dimensional crossover. We also investigate other compactifications. We calculate the crossover function for a box confinement and introduce approximate flow equations for a confinement in a harmonic trap.