The weakly interacting Bose gas at the critical temperature

Chapter 20 examines effects of weak repulsive interactions in a Bose–Einstein condensate and the transition from Bose–Einstein condensate to superfluid phase transition. Renormalization group methods are used and a universal amplitude is calculated by non–perturbative methods. After the discovery of the predicted Bose–Einstein condensation, which is a property of free bosons, an interesting issue was the effects of weak repulsive interactions. In this chapter, it is shown that, near the transition temperature, the initial non–relativistic field theory can be replaced by a relativistic effective Euclidean field theory known to describe a superfluid phase transition (a dimensional reduction). These theoretical considerations are illustrated by an evaluation of the universal variation of the transition temperature at weak coupling. For this purpose, the O(2) symmetry of the model is generalized to O(N) symmetry, and large N techniques are used.