An independent-pair ansatz is developed for the many-body wave function of dilute Bose systems. The pair correlation is optimized by minimizing the expectation value of the full Hamiltonian (rather than the truncated Bogoliubov one) providing a rigorous energy upper bound. In contrast with the Jastrow model, hypernetted chain theory provides closed-form exactly solvable equations for the optimized pair correlation. The model involves both condensate and coherent pairing with number conservation and kinetic-energy sum rules satisfied exactly and the compressibility sum rule obeyed at low density. We compute, for bulk boson matter at a given density and zero temperature, (i) the two-body distribution function, (ii) the energy per particle, (iii) the sound velocity, (iv) the chemical potential, (v) the momentum distribution and its condensate fraction, and (vi) the pairing function, which quantifies the off-diagonal long-range order resulting from the structural properties of the two-particle density matrix. The connections with the low-density expansion and Bogoliubov theory are analyzed at different density values, including the density and scattering length regime of interest of trapped-atom Bose-Einstein condensates. Comparison with the available diffusion Monte Carlo results is also made.
The thermodynamics of a homogeneous dilute Bose gas with an arbitrarily strong repulsion between particles is investigated on the basis of the exact relation connecting the pair correlation function with the in-medium pair wave functions and occupation numbers. It is shown that the effective-interaction scheme, which is reduced to the Bogoliubov model with the effective pairwise potential, is not acceptable for investigating the short-range particle correlations in a dilute strongly interacting Bose gas. In contrast to this scheme, our model is thermodynamically consistent and free of the ultraviolet divergences due to accurate treatment of the short-range boson correlations. An equation for the in-medium scattering amplitude is derived that makes it possible to find the in-medium renormalization for the pair wave functions at short boson separations. Low-density expansions for the main thermodynamic quantities are reinvestigated on the basis of this equation. In addition, the expansions are found for the interaction and kinetic energies per particle. It is demonstrated that for a many-boson system of hard spheres the interaction energy is equal to zero for any boson density. The exact relationship between the chemical potential and in-medium pair wave functions is also established.
Several properties of trapped hard-sphere bosons are evaluated using variational Monte Carlo techniques. A trial wave function composed of a renormalized single-particle Gaussian and a hard-sphere Jastrow function for pair correlations is used to study the sensitivity of condensate and noncondensate properties to the hard-sphere radius and the number of particles. Special attention is given to diagonalizing the one-body density matrix and obtaining the corresponding single-particle natural orbitals and their occupation numbers for the system. The condensate wave function and condensate fraction are then obtained from the single-particle orbital with the highest occupation. The effect of interaction on other quantities such as the ground-state energy, the mean radial displacement, and the momentum distribution is calculated as well. Results are compared with mean-field theory in the dilute limit.
We study the accuracy of analytical wave-function-based many-body methods derived by energy minimization of a Jastrow-Feenberg ansatz for electrons (the ``Fermi hypernetted chain/Euler Lagrange'' approach). Approximations to avoid the complexity of the fermion problem are chosen to parallel successful boson theories and to be computationally efficient. For the three-dimensional homogeneous electron gas, we calculate the correlation energy, the pair distribution function, and the static structure function in comparison with simulation results. We also present a variant of theory which is interpreted as an approximate, self-consistent sum of ladder and ring diagrams of perturbation theory. The theory performs particularly well in the highly dilute density regime.
Many useful properties of dilute Bose gases at ultra-low temperature are predicted precisely by the product-state ansatz, in which all particles are in the same quantum state. As particle-particle correlations become important, however, the product ansatz begins to fail. We consider a new set of states, which constitute a natural generalization of the product ansatz; the particle-correlated state of
N=l×n identical particles is derived by symmetrizing the
n-fold product of an
l-particle quantum state. The particle-correlated states can be simulated efficiently for large
N, because their parameter spaces, which depend on
l, do not grow with
n. Here we pay special attention to the pure-state case for
l=2, where the many-body state is constructed from a two-particle pure state. These paired wave functions for bosons, which we call pair-correlated states (PCS), were introduced by Leggett [Rev. Mod. Phys.
73, 307 (2001)] as a particle-number-conserving version of the Bogoliubov approximation. We present an iterative algorithm that solves the reduced (marginal) density matrices (RDMs)---these are the correlation functions---associated with PCS in time
O(N). The RDMs can also be derived from the normalization factor of PCS, which is derived analytically in the large
N limit. To test the efficacy of our theory, we analyze the ground state of the two-site Bose-Hubbard model by minimizing the energy of the PCS state, both in its exact form and in its large-
N approximate form. The relative errors of the ground state energy for both cases are within
10−5 for
N=1000 particles over the entire parameter region from a single condensate to a Mott insulator. Moreover, we present numerical results that suggest that PCS might be useful for describing the dynamics in the strongly interacting regime.
We investigate the zero-temperature properties of a diluted homogeneous Bose gas made of
N particles interacting via a two-body square-well potential by performing Monte Carlo simulations. We tune the interaction strength to achieve arbitrary positive values of the scattering length and compute by Monte Carlo quadrature the energy per particle
E/N and the condensate fraction
N0/N of this system by using a Jastrow ansatz for the many-body wave function, which avoids the formation of the self-bound ground state and describes instead a (metastable) gaseous state with uniform density. In the unitarity limit, where the scattering length diverges while the range of the interatomic potential is much smaller than the average distance between atoms, we find a finite energy per particle [$E/N=0.70\phantom{\rule{4pt}{0ex}}{\ensuremath{\hbar}}^{2}{(6{\ensuremath{\pi}}^{2}n)}^{2/3}/2m$, with
n the number density] and a quite large condensate fraction (
N0/N=0.83).