Thermodynamics of a weakly interacting Bose-Einstein gas

The one-loop effective potential for nonrelativistic bosuns with a delta function repulsive potential is calculated for a given chemical potential using functional methods. After renormalization and at zero temperature it reproduces the standard ground state energy and pressure as function of the particle density. At finite temperatures it is found necessary to include ring corrections to the one-loop result in order to satisfy the Goldstone theorem. II is natural to introduce an effective chemical potential directly related to the order parameter and which uniformly decreases with increasing temperatures. This is in contrast to the ordinary chemical potential which peaks at the critical temperature. The resulting thermodynamics in the condensed phase at very low temperatures is found to be the same as in the Bogoliubov approximation where the degrees of freedom are given by the Goldstone bosons. At higher temperatures the ring corrections dominate and result in a critical temperature unaffected by the interaction. (C) 1998 Academic Press.