Hamiltonian for a Bose gas with Contact Interactions

We study the Hamiltonian for a Bose gas in three dimensions of N 3 spinless particles interacting via zero-range or contact interactions. Such interactions are described by (singular) boundary conditions satisfied at the coincidence hyperplanes, i. e. , when the coordinates of two particles coincide. It is known that if one imposes the same kind of boundary condition of the one-body problem with a point interaction then one is inevitably led to a Hamiltonian unbounded from below and therefore unstable. This is due to the fact that the interaction becomes too strong and attractive when the coordinates of three or more particles coincide. In order to avoid such instability property, we develop a suggestion formulated by Minlos and Faddeev in 1962 and introduce a slightly modified boundary condition which reduces the strength of the interaction when the positions of the particles i, j coincide in the following cases: a) a third particle approaches the common position of i and j; b) two other particles approach to each other. In all the other cases the usual boundary condition is restored. Following a quadratic form approach, we prove that the Hamiltonian characterized by such modified boundary condition is self-adjoint and bounded from below. We also show that the N-body Hamiltonian with contact interactions obtained years ago by Albeverio, Hegh-Krohn and Streit using the theory of Dirichlet forms (J. Math. Phys. , 18, 907--917, 1977) is a special case of our Hamiltonian.