Excitations in a Bose Gas at Finite Temperatures. II. Relation between Single-Particle and Density Fluctuations

By making a systematic analysis of correlation functions in terms of irreducible and reducible parts, Ma and others have developed a dielectric formulation of the dynamics of a condensed Bose system which fully includes the background (or excited) atoms. We show that this formulation quite generally leads to the density and single-particle-correlation functions both having two resonances ${\stackrel{\ifmmode \tilde{}\else \~{}\fi{}}{\ensuremath{\omega}}}_{1}$ and ${\stackrel{\ifmmode \tilde{}\else \~{}\fi{}}{\ensuremath{\omega}}}_{2}$ although with different weights. If the condensate ${n}_{0}=0$, the ${\ensuremath{\omega}}_{2}$ mode only appears in the single-particle spectrum while ${\ensuremath{\omega}}_{1}$ only appears in the density-fluctuation spectrum. For finite values of ${n}_{0}$, these modes are coupled and renormalized to ${\stackrel{\ifmmode \tilde{}\else \~{}\fi{}}{\ensuremath{\omega}}}_{1}$ and ${\stackrel{\ifmmode \tilde{}\else \~{}\fi{}}{\ensuremath{\omega}}}_{2}$. As a specific illustration, we use the shielded-potential approximation (SPA) for the reducible self-energies. In this model, we find the free-particle excitations (${\ensuremath{\omega}}_{2}$) are coupled to the zero-sound density fluctuations (${\ensuremath{\omega}}_{1}$) through the action of the condensate. In the SPA, the reducible self-energies have a pole at ${\ensuremath{\omega}}_{1}$. The usual Bogoliubov, Hartree-Fock, and ordinary $t$-matrix approximations involve nonsingular self-energies and hence do not exhibit the ${\stackrel{\ifmmode \tilde{}\else \~{}\fi{}}{\ensuremath{\omega}}}_{1}$ mode. Experimentally, it appears that the high-frequency ${\stackrel{\ifmmode \tilde{}\else \~{}\fi{}}{\ensuremath{\omega}}}_{2}$ mode has never been detected, but this is probably owing to the fact that it is strongly damped as a result of its coupling to the zero-sound mode. Using the two-fluid hydrodynamic equations, one can argue that at low frequencies the ${\stackrel{\ifmmode \tilde{}\else \~{}\fi{}}{\ensuremath{\omega}}}_{1}$ excitation corresponds to first sound and the ${\stackrel{\ifmmode \tilde{}\else \~{}\fi{}}{\ensuremath{\omega}}}_{2}$ excitation corresponds to second sound. Finally, we briefly discuss the possibility of singularities in the irreducible self-energies at high frequencies and the resulting two-roton bound states.