Dynamics and thermodynamics of the low-temperature strongly interacting Bose gas

Phys Rev Lett. 2011 Sep 23;107(13):135301. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.107.135301. Epub 2011 Sep 19.

Abstract

We measure the zero-temperature equation of state of a homogeneous Bose gas of (7)Li atoms by analyzing the in situ density distributions of trapped samples. For increasing repulsive interactions our data show a clear departure from mean-field theory and provide a quantitative test of the many-body corrections first predicted in 1957 by Lee, Huang, and Yang [Phys. Rev. 106, 1135 (1957).]. We further probe the dynamic response of the Bose gas to a varying interaction strength and compare it to simple theoretical models. We deduce a lower bound for the value of the universal constant ξ > 0.44(8) that would characterize the universal Bose gas at the unitary limit.