Gross--Pitaevskii equation for a strongly interacting superfluid boson system

The Gross-Pitaevskii equation for the order parameter of a superfluid boson system is derived in a form which is applicable to a system in which the two-body potential has a strong repulsive core, as is the case for liquid helium. The equation of motion for the order parameter, defined as the matrix element of the field annihilation operator between the states of an (N-1)-particle and an N-particle system, is obtained. The term describing the average potential due to the other particles is expanded in a perturbation series, in which the coherentstate representation is used. The resulting expansion is the same as using the Bogoliubov approximation and Wick's theorem, and shows that the Bogoliubov expansion is exact in the limit of an infinite number of particles. The perturbation expansion is partially resummed to give a Hartree field in which the potential has been replaced by the T matrix, which gives a finite average effective field.