FIFTY YEARS OF HARD-SPHERE BOSE GAS: 1957–2007

Fifty years ago, Yang and I worked on the dilute hard-sphere Bose gas, which has been experimentally realized only relatively recently. I recount the background of that work, subsequent developments, and fresh understanding. In the original work, we had to rearrange the perturbation series, which was equivalent to the Bogoliubov transformation. A deeper reason for the rearrangement has been a puzzle. I can now explain it as a crossover from ideal gas to interacting gas behavior, a phenonmenon arising from Bose statistics. The crossover region is infinitesimally small for a macroscopic system, and thus unobservable. However, it is experimentally relevant in mesoscopic systems, such as a Bose gas trapped in an external potential, or on an optical lattice.