Critical behavior of weakly interacting bosons: A functional renormalization group approach

TL;DR

This paper uses the functional renormalization group to analyze the momentum-dependent self-energy of weakly interacting bosons at the critical temperature, providing insights into the crossover behavior and critical exponents in three dimensions.

Contribution

It introduces a truncation scheme for the flow equations that captures the crossover behavior and estimates the critical exponent eta for weakly interacting bosons.

Findings

The self-energy interpolates correctly between critical and short-wavelength regimes.

The approach estimates the critical exponent eta 0.0513.

The interaction-induced shift in T_c matches previous results.

Abstract

We present a detailed investigation of the momentum-dependent self-energy Sigma(k) at zero frequency of weakly interacting bosons at the critical temperature T_c of Bose-Einstein condensation in dimensions 3<=D<4. Applying the functional renormalization group, we calculate the universal scaling function for the self-energy at zero frequency but at all wave vectors within an approximation which truncates the flow equations of the irreducible vertices at the four-point level. The self-energy interpolates between the critical regime k << k_c and the short-wavelength regime k >> k_c, where k_c is the crossover scale. In the critical regime, the self-energy correctly approaches the asymptotic behavior Sigma(k) \propto k^{2 - eta}, and in the short-wavelength regime the behavior is Sigma(k) \propto k^{2(D-3)} in D>3. In D=3, we recover the logarithmic divergence Sigma(k) \propto ln(k/k_c) encountered in perturbation theory. Our approach yields the crossover scale k_c as well as a reasonable estimate for the critical exponent eta in D=3. From our scaling function we find for the interaction-induced shift in T_c in three dimensions, Delta T_c / T_c = 1.23 a n^{1/3}, where a is the s-wave scattering length and n is the density, in excellent agreement with other approaches. We also discuss the flow of marginal parameters in D=3 and extend our truncation scheme of the renormalization group equations by including the six- and eight-point vertex, which yields an improved estimate for the anomalous dimension eta \approx 0.0513. We further calculate the constant lim_{k->0} Sigma(k)/k^{2-eta} and find good agreement with recent Monte-Carlo data.