Effective action for Bose-Einstein condensates

TL;DR

This paper develops a self-consistent effective action framework for interacting Bose-Einstein condensates, ensuring fundamental symmetries and revealing a new decay mechanism for collective excitations.

Contribution

It introduces a concise order-by-order effective action formulation that satisfies key theorems and predicts a novel decay mode for Bogoliubov excitations.

Findings

Effective action expressed in terms of interaction vertex and condensate order parameter.

Ensures compliance with Noether's and Goldstone's theorems.

Predicts a decay rate for Bogoliubov modes due to self-energy structure.

Abstract

We clarify basic properties of an effective action (i.e., self-consistent perturbation expansion) for interacting Bose-Einstein condensates, where field $\psi$ itself acquires a finite thermodynamic average $\langle \psi\rangle$ besides two-point Green's function $\hat G$ to form an off-diagonal long-range order. It is shown that the action can be expressed concisely order by order in terms of the interaction vertex and a special combination of $\langle\psi\rangle$ and $\hat G$ so as to satisfy both Noether's theorem and Goldstone's theorem (I) corresponding to the first proof. The self-energy is predicted to have a one-particle-reducible structure due to $\langle \psi\rangle\neq 0$ to transform the Bogoliubov mode into a bubbling mode with a substantial decay rate.