The Ground State Energy of a Dilute Bose Gas

Elliott H. Lieb, Jakob Yngvason

Published 1999-10-20, updated 2000-08-20Version 2

According to a formula that was put forward many decades ago the ground state energy per particle of an interacting, dilute Bose gas at density $\rho$ is $2\pi\hbar^2\rho a/m$ to leading order in $\rho a^3\ll 1$, where $a$ is the scattering length of the interaction potential and $m$ the particle mass. This result, which is important for the theoretical description of current experiments on Bose-Einstein condensation, has recently been established rigorously for the first time. We give here an account of the proof that applies to nonnegative, spherically symmetric potentials decreasing faster than $1/r^3$ at infinity.