Conserving gapless mean-field theory for weakly interacting Bose gases

This paper presents a conserving gapless mean-field theory for weakly interacting Bose gases. We first construct a mean-field Luttinger-Ward thermodynamic functional in terms of the condensate wave function Ψ and the Nambu Green's function G for the quasiparticle field. Imposing its stationarity respect to Ψ and G yields a set of equations to determine the equilibrium for general non-uniform systems. They have a plausible property of satisfying the Hugenholtz-Pines theorem to provide a gapless excitation spectrum. Also, the corresponding dynamical equations of motion obey various conservation laws. Thus, the present mean-field theory shares two important properties with the exact theory: 'conserving' and 'gapless'. The theory is then applied to a homogeneous weakly interacting Bose gas with s-wave scattering length a and particle mass m to clarify its basic thermodynamic properties under two complementary conditions of constant density n and constant pressure p. The superfluid transition is predicted to be first-order because of the non-analytic nature of the order-parameter expansion near Tc inherent in Bose systems, i.e., the Landau-Ginzburg expansion is not possible here. The transition temperature Tc shows quite a different interaction dependence between the n-fixed and p-fixed cases. In the former case Tc increases from the ideal gas value T0 as Tc/T0=1+2.33an1/3, whereas it decreases in the latter as Tc/T0=1-3.84a(mp/2πℎ2)1/5. Temperature dependences of basic thermodynamic quantities are clarified explicitly. (author)