Weakly interacting Bose gases in the canonical ensemble

Abstract

Based on the canonical description of a non-interacting Bose gas, we work out how both thermodynamic and statistical properties change perturbatively with respect to weak two-particle interactions. Up to first order, we obtain a recursion formula for the canonical partition function, which consists of the same Feynman diagrams as the grand-canonical description but with different Feynman rules. Resumming this recursion formula for the canonical partition function allows one to characterize the statistics of the ground-state occupancy by its respective cumulants. We demonstrate the applicability of this approach by analyzing a dilute Bose gas with contact interaction in a box trap. To this end, we used Dirichlet boundary conditions in view of their relevance for current experiments with atomic gases, where the box trap is implemented, for instance, with digital mirror devices.