The London ground-state energy formula as a function of number density for a system of identical boson hard spheres, corrected for the reduced mass of a pair of particles in a “sphere-of-influence” picture, and generalized to fermion hard-sphere systems with two and four intrinsic degrees of freedom, has a double-pole at the ultimate regular (or periodic, e.g., face-centered-cubic) close-packing density usually associated with a crystalline branch. Improved fluid branches are constructed based upon exact, field-theoretic perturbation-theory low-density expansions for many-boson and many-fermion systems, extrapolated to intermediate densities via Padé and other approximants, but whose ultimate density is irregular or random closest close-packing as suggested in studies of a classical system of hard spheres. Results show substantially improved agreement with the best available Green-function Monte Carlo and diffusion Monte Carlo simulations for bosons, as well as with ladder, variational Fermi hypernetted chain, and so-called $L$-expansion data for two-component fermions.

• Received 16 May 2007

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.76.031125