Eur. Phys. J. B 60, 289-303 (2007)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2007-00352-7

The Girardeau's fermion-boson procedure in the light of the composite-boson many-body theory

Institut des NanoSciences de Paris, Université Pierre et Marie Curie-Paris 6, CNRS, Campus Boucicaut, 140 rue de Lourmel, 75015 Paris, France

Corresponding author: ^a monique.combescot@insp.jussieu.fr

Received: 5 March 2007
Revised: 8 June 2007
Published online: 22 December 2007

Abstract

We reconsider the procedure developed for atoms a few decades ago by Girardeau, in the light of the composite-boson many-body theory we recently proposed. The Girardeau's procedure makes use of a so called “unitary Fock-Tani operator” which in an exact way transforms one composite bound atom into one bosonic “ideal” atom. When used to transform the Hamiltonian of interacting atoms, this operator generates an extremely complex set of effective scatterings between ideal bosonic atoms and free fermions which makes the transformed Hamiltonian impossible to write explicitly, in this way forcing to some truncation. The scatterings restricted to the ideal-atom subspace are shown to read rather simply in terms of the two elementary scatterings of the composite-boson many-body theory, namely, the energy-like direct interaction scatterings — which describe fermion interactions without fermion exchange — and the dimensionless Pauli scatterings — which describe fermion exchanges without fermion interaction. We here show that, due to a fundamental difference in the scalar products of elementary and composite bosons, the Hamiltonian expectation value for N ground state atoms obtained by staying in the ideal-atom subspace and working with boson operators only, differ from the exact ones even for N = 2 and a mapping to the ideal-atom subspace performed, as advocated, from the fully antisymmetrical atomic state, i.e., the state which obeys the so-called “subsidiary condition”. This shows that, within this Girardeau's procedure too, we cannot completely forget the underlying fermionic components of the particles if we want to correctly describe their interactions.