Condensation and interaction range in harmonic boson traps: A variational approach - art. no. 043605

For a gas of N bosons interacting through a two-body Morse potential a vari ational bound of the free energy of a confined system is obtained. The calc ulation method is based on the Feynman-Kac functional projected on the symm etric representation. Within the harmonic approximation a variational estim ate of the effect of the interaction range on the existence of many-particl e bound states, and on the N-T phase diagram is obtained.