Ground state of a resonantly interacting Bose gas

Abstract

We show that a two-channel mean-field theory for a Bose gas near a Feshbach resonance allows for an analytic computation of the chemical potential, and therefore the universal constant \beta, at unitarity. To improve on this mean-field theory, which physically neglects condensate depletion, we study a variational Jastrow ansatz for the ground-state wave function and use the hypernetted-chain approximation to minimize the energy for all positive values of the scattering length. We also show that other important physical quantities such as Tan's contact and the condensate fraction can be directly obtained from this approach.