Ground state of a homogeneous Bose gas: a diffusion Monte Carlo calculation

Abstract

We use a diffusion Monte Carlo method to calculate the lowest energy state of a uniform gas of bosons interacting through different model potentials, both strictly repulsive and with an attractive well. We explicitly verify that at low density the energy per particle follows a universal behavior fixed by the gas parameter na^3. In the regime of densities typical for experiments in trapped Bose-condensed gases, the corrections to the mean-field energies greatly exceed the differences due to the details of the potential.