Nature of the Bogoliubov ground state of a weakly interacting Bose gas

A. M. Ettouhami

Published 2007-02-05, updated 2010-03-08Version 5

As is well-known, in Bogoliubov's theory of an interacting Bose gas the ground state of the Hamiltonian $\hat{H}=\sum_{\bf k\neq 0}\hat{H}_{\bf k}$ is found by diagonalizing each of the Hamiltonians $\hat{H}_{\bf k}$ corresponding to a given momentum mode ${\bf k}$ independently of the Hamiltonians $\hat{H}_{\bf k'(\neq k)}$ of the remaining modes. We argue that this way of diagonalizing $\hat{H}$ may not be adequate, since the Hilbert spaces where the single-mode Hamiltonians $\hat{H}_{\bf k}$ are diagonalized are not disjoint, but have the ${\bf k}=0$ in common. A number-conserving generalization of Bogoliubov's method is presented where the total Hamiltonian $\hat{H}$ is diagonalized directly. When this is done, the spectrum of excitations changes from a gapless one, as predicted by Bogoliubov's method, to one which has a finite gap in the $k\to 0$ limit.