Critical Temperature of Bose-Einstein Condensation of Hard Sphere Gases

Peter Grüter, David Ceperley, Franck Laloë

Published 1997-07-03, updated 1997-07-11Version 2

We determine the critical temperature of a 3-d homogeneous system of hard-sphere Bosons by path-integral Monte Carlo simulations and finite-size scaling. At low densities, we find that the critical temperature is increased by the repulsive interactions, in the form of a power law in density with exponent 1/3: $\Delta T_C/T_0\sim (na^3)^{1/3}$. At high densities the result for liquid helium, namely a lower critical temperature than in the non-interacting case, is recovered. We give a microscopic explanation for the observed behavior.