Ground state of a homogeneous Bose gas: A diffusion Monte Carlo calculation

We use a diffusion Monte Carlo method to calculate the lowest-energy state of a uniform gas of bosons interacting through different model potentials, both strictly repulsive and with an attractive well. We explicitly verify that at low density the energy per particle follows a universal behavior fixed by the gas parameter na³. In the regime of densities typical for experiments in trapped Bose-condensed gases, the corrections to the mean-field energy greatly exceed the differences due to the details of the potential.