A gapless theory of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases at finite temperature

In this paper we develop a gapless theory of Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) which can be applied to both trapped and homogeneous gases at zero and finite temperature. The starting point for the theory is the second quantized, many-body Hamiltonian for a system of structureless bosons with pairwise interactions. A number-conserving approach is used to rewrite this Hamiltonian in a form which is approximately quadratic with higher-older cubic and quartic terms. The quadratic part of the Hamiltonian can be diagonalized exactly by transforming to a quasiparticle basis, while requiring that the condensate satisfy the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. The non-quadratic terms are assumed to have a small effect and are dealt with using first- and second-order perturbation theory. The conventional treatment of these terms, based on factorization approximations. is shown to be inconsistent. Infrared divergences can appear in individual terms of the perturbation expansion. but we show analytically that the total contribution beyond quadratic order is finite. The resulting excitation spectrum is gapless and the energy shifts are small for a dilute gas away from the critical region, justifying the use of perturbation theory. Ultraviolet divergences can appear if a contact potential is used to describe particle interactions. We show that the use of this potential as an approximation to the two-body T-matrix leads naturally to a high-energy renormalization. The theory developed in this paper is therefore well defined at both low and high energy and provides a systematic description of BEC in dilute gases. It can therefore be used to calculate the energies and decay rates of the excitations of the system at temperatures approaching the phase transition.