The Simplified Approach to the Bose Gas Without Translation Invariance

Abstract

The simplified approach to the Bose gas was introduced by Lieb in 1963 to study the ground state of systems of interacting Bosons. In a series of recent papers, it has been shown that the simplified approach exceeds earlier expectations, and gives asymptotically accurate predictions at both low and high density. In the intermediate density regime, the qualitative predictions of the simplified approach have also been found to agree very well with quantum Monte Carlo computations. Until now, the simplified approach had only been formulated for translation invariant systems, thus excluding external potentials, and non-periodic boundary conditions. In this paper, we extend the formulation of the simplified approach to a wide class of systems without translation invariance. This also allows us to study observables in translation invariant systems whose computation requires the symmetry to be broken. Such an observable is the momentum distribution, which counts the number of particles in excited states of the Laplacian. In this paper, we show how to compute the momentum distribution in the simplified approach, and show that, for the simple equation, our prediction matches up with Bogolyubov’s prediction at low densities, for momenta extending up to the inverse healing length.