Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2014 iii Paper 81 2 b Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Put and , and assume the homogeneous condensate is stable, so for nonzero modes. A real Bogoliubov transformation isThe canonical condition preserves the bosonic canonical commutation relations. Cancellation of pair terms requires . ThereforeThe sign of follows that of . Normal ordering the transformed operators gives the bosonic Bogoliubov zero-point shift:Rearranging the last two terms is exactly the requested form. Each momentum appears in the sums, so opposite-momentum pairs are not counted again separately.
The Bogoliubov quasiparticle dispersion is linear at low momentum when :It is a gapless phonon of the condensate, unlike the free-particle quadratic spectrum. For a contact repulsion , the healing length controls crossover to the particle regime . A momentum-dependent potential can modify the higher-energy curve; the sketch uses the contact case and does not assume every interaction has that entire shape.
For each opposite-momentum pair use the Bogoliubov transformationEquivalently , , with . The identity preserves the canonical commutation relation. Vanishing anomalous terms require , and hence the Bogoliubov quasiparticle dispersion isSubstitution and normal ordering giveThis is the requested form after putting each inside the oscillator term. By momentum-pair counting in bosonic diagonalization, all sums cover the full nonzero-momentum set; no further factor of two is needed. The bosonic Bogoliubov zero-point shift combines the two vacuum sums before taking a continuum limit.
If smoothly, the low-energy excitations are gapless phonons:For contact repulsion, the healing length separates this regime from the particle-like regime . Stability requires for every nonzero mode. A general momentum-dependent interaction need not share the contact model's entire curve. An unregularized contact model also makes the vacuum-energy shift ultraviolet divergent; a physical finite-range interaction or scattering-length renormalization is needed for that absolute ground-state energy.

