On the boson mapping of fermion collective pairs

We study the problem of the mapping of fermion collective pairs onto particle-particle bosons and of different fermion operators (hamiltonian, one- and two-particle transfer operators) onto corresponding boson ones and we test the consequences of the truncation to lowest orders of these boson operators. We find that, although the lowest-order terms in the expansion of the operators in boson space lead to matrix elements between boson states which display the qualitative behaviour of the corresponding ones between fermion states, higher-order terms are required to get a quantitative agreement when a large number of particles are involved, as a direct consequence of the increased role of the Pauli principle. (orig.)