Quantum Monte Carlo measurement of the chemical potential of helium-4

Abstract

A path integral Monte Carlo method based on the worm algorithm has been developed to compute the chemical potential of interacting bosonic quantum fluids. By applying it to finite-sized systems of helium-4 atoms, we have confirmed that the chemical potential scales inversely with the number of particles to lowest order. The introduction of a simple scaling form allows for the extrapolation of the chemical potential to the thermodynamic limit, where we observe excellent agreement with known experimental results for helium-4 at saturated vapor pressure. We speculate on future applications of the proposed technique, including its use in studies of confined quantum fluids.