English

A new field theoretic method for the virial expansion

Statistical Mechanics 2011-08-22 v2 High Energy Physics - Lattice High Energy Physics - Phenomenology Nuclear Theory

Abstract

We develop a graphical method for computing the virial expansion coefficients for a nonrelativistic quantum field theory. As an example we compute the third virial coefficient b3 for unitary fermions, a nonperturbative system. By calculating several graphs and performing an extrapolation, we arrive at b3 =-0.2930, within 0.7% of a recent computation b3 = -0.29095295 by Liu, Hu and Drummond, which involved summing 10,000 energy levels for three unitary fermions in a harmonic trap.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1105.0028,
  title  = {A new field theoretic method for the virial expansion},
  author = {David B. Kaplan and Sichun Sun},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1105.0028},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

4 pages, 6 figures,Published version; added references, typos fixed, figures modified

R2 v1 2026-06-21T18:00:41.051Z