Conserving Gapless Mean-Field Theory for Weakly Interacting Bose Gases

Abstract

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 $\Psi$ and the Nambu Green's function $\hat{G}$ for the quasiparticle field. Imposing its stationarity respect to $\Psi$ and $\hat{G}$ 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 $T_{c}$ inherent in Bose systems, i.e., the Landau-Ginzburg expansion is not possible here. The transition temperature $T_{c}$ shows quite a different interaction dependence between the $n$-fixed and $p$-fixed cases. In the former case $T_{c}$ increases from the ideal gas value $T_{0}$ as $T_{c}/T_{0}= 1+ 2.33 an^{1/3}$, whereas it decreases in the latter as $T_{c}/T_{0}= 1- 3.84a(mp/2\pi\hbar^{2})^{1/5}$. Temperature dependences of basic thermodynamic quantities are clarified explicitly.