The Ideal Bose Gas

Abstract

As a first concrete application of quantum statistics we want to calculate in this section the properties of an ideal gas of (nonrelativistic) indistinguishable bosons. One has to expect that the ideal Bose gas becomes the ideal Boltzmann gas (classical ideal gas) at high temperatures and low densities. The largest deviations in thermodynamic properties should therefore occur if the condition

$$n{\lambda ^3} \equiv \frac{N}{V}{\lambda ^3} = \frac{N}{V}{(\frac{{{h^2}}}{{2\pi mkT}})^{3/2}} \ll 1$$

(13.1)