Abstract

We study the properties of quantum gases which are dilute in terms of the interactions but degenerate; this may be the case if the thermal wavelength of the particles is much larger than the interatomic potential range. We assume that the potential contains a short range repulsive part, which creates strong correlations between particles that cannot be treated by ordinary perturbation theory, even if the region of configuration space where they are dominant is relatively small. Our method combines two basic ingredients: Ursell operators, which generalize the Ursell functions that are usually used to generate quantum cluster expansions, but are not in themselves symmetrized (the operators can be related to an auxiliary system of distinguishable particles); in a distinct step, an exact treatment of particle indistinguishability is given through the inclusion of exchange cycles of arbitrary length. For non-condensed boson systems, as well as for fermion systems, the method provides a compact expression of the partition function that generalizes the well-known Beth–Uhlenbeck formula to arbitrary degeneracy. For the study of the Bose–Einstein condensation, our treatment retains more information on the short range correlations than, for instance, the Hartree–Fock method. It also introduces a natural and explicit distinction between particles and quasiparticles; the latter may condense into a single one-particle state, which obeys a non-linear equation somewhat similar to the Gross–Pitaevskii equation.