Interpret the box as a hard-wall cube. Its one-particle levels are for positive integers, giving . Counting lattice points in a positive octant and differentiating the large-radius count gives the supplied continuum density of states. Expressing its prefactor through yieldsHere denotes the dimensionless constant requested in this question, to distinguish it from the unrelated hyperfine constant of question 1. Periodic boundary conditions would have zero ground energy and would not permit this parametrization by a nonzero .
Separate the ground-state occupation from excited particles. The finite-box ground-energy convention in Bose condensation makes the chemical potential approach the ground energy from below as that occupation becomes macroscopic. In the thermodynamic continuum approximation one shifts the energy zero to the ground state and sets the limiting chemical potential to zero in the excited-state integral. The difference between the exact shifted density and its bulk form gives finite-size corrections; at the transition . ThusThe identity follows by expanding and integrating each term. The excited states have a finite saturation capacity. Setting that capacity equal to determines condensation:Equivalently , with .
At fixed , below the chemical potential is pinned to its limiting value andAbove , and there is no macroscopic ; the chemical potential adjusts rather than allowing the saturation expression to exceed the available particles. At fixed , put . For , and is not macroscopic; for , saturates while grows linearly. This is particle saturation in a homogeneous Bose gas; the sharp threshold is a thermodynamic-limit approximation to finite-box occupations.
Ideal-box particle saturation and the heat-capacity crossover from phonons to particle-like excitations
. Details. The interaction scale compares differently with confinement and transition energies:Thus the stated range makes interactions dominate the ground-state confinement energy while remaining small on the thermal scale controlling . This is an interaction-dominated ground state with nearly ideal condensation temperature. It also gives the dilute-gas parameter . A contact model has and ; the question's suppresses order-one factors, and the uniform ground energy per particle is , rather than exactly . Weak interactions can shift slightly, but their dimensionless strength makes that a small relative effect. In a hard-wall box, boundary healing layers do not overturn bulk interaction dominance when their thickness is small compared with .
At , thermally occupied Bogoliubov modes have , with . There is one acoustic branch for this spinless gas. Its thermal energy determines the phonon heat capacity of a dilute Bose gas:The zero-temperature interaction energy does not itself contribute to this leading temperature derivative at fixed . This bulk power law also requires so that the phonon spectrum may be treated as continuous; a strictly finite box eventually has discrete-level activated behaviour.
For the noninteracting condensed Bose gas, the ideal Bose-gas heat capacity below condensation follows by integrating :Its limiting value at is about . At very low temperature the interacting phonon curve is suppressed relative to the ideal curve, has slope three on logarithmic axes, and crosses over towards particle-like behaviour around . Since , most of the interval below is approximately ideal at leading weak-coupling order. The figure marks a qualitative extrapolation near the transition: a zero-temperature Bogoliubov spectrum does not determine precise interacting critical heat capacity or its small transition shift. The illustrative fixed- interpolation is not claimed as a controlled critical-region calculation.
An elementary excitation is an approximately independent low-energy normal mode above a many-body equilibrium state. A Bogoliubov transformation mixes creation and annihilation operators to diagonalize a quadratic fluctuation Hamiltonian. For weakly interacting bosons,interpolating between sound and particle-like motion. Bosonic canonical commutators require . In BCS theory, fermionic particle–hole mixtures instead have and excitation energies . These fermionic quasiparticles must be distinguished from collective amplitude and phase oscillations of the pair field.
For the stated dimensionless first-order equation, a nonzero uniform static solution obeys . Thus . The zero field is also stationary, but is not the condensed minimum of the local potential .
Choose . To linear order, , so . Substitution and separation of real and imaginary parts giveDifferentiating the first relation and using the second yieldsThe same elimination holds for . A plane wave therefore givesThe density and phase components share this frequency because of density-phase conjugacy. They are coupled components of one positive-frequency Bogoliubov mode, not two independent excitations that happen to have equal energies. At , a constant phase change is a zero mode; the nonzero- elimination should not be used to assign an independent oscillation to a uniform density change.
Replacing the first-order time derivative by changes the number and structure of dynamical degrees of freedom. The linearized real and imaginary equations now decouple:The amplitude and phase modes of a second-order complex field consequently haveThe amplitude mode has a nonzero gap ; the phase mode is gapless with speed . Frequencies are nonnegative, so the printed expression is understood for or replaced by .
In the complex plane, an amplitude oscillation moves radially relative to the chosen equilibrium , and a phase oscillation moves tangentially, or along a short unit-circle arc beyond linear order. A first-order coupled mode combines them in quadrature. For a fixed spatial factor and , one possible parametrization isso traces a small ellipse about . Choose small enough that both components remain within the linear approximation.
A weak neutral Bose condensate realizes the first-order structure and its sound-like Bogoliubov spectrum. A particle–hole-symmetric effective complex field can realize the second-order structure, with a gapless Goldstone mode and a distinct amplitude mode. A neutral BCS superfluid likewise has collective phase and amplitude responses, although the amplitude response near pair-breaking energy need not be a sharp undamped particle; its fermionic quasiparticles are separate excitations.
In a charged bulk superconductor, long-range Coulomb interactions and electromagnetic dynamics remove the neutral sound-like phase branch from the low-frequency spectrum. The Anderson-Higgs mechanism in a superconductor produces a longitudinal plasma mode, schematically in an appropriate long-wavelength model. The amplitude scale is typically associated with in a simple BCS regime, with damping and mixing dependent on material and symmetry. One should not simply retain the neutral Goldstone dispersion after charging the field, nor identify the static Ginzburg-Landau functional alone with a complete time-dependent microscopic theory.

