Static and thermodynamic properties of flow-density supercritical 4He-breakdown of the Feynman-Hibbs approximation

We study the applicability of the semiclassical Feynman and Hibbs (FH) (second-order or fourth-order) effective potentials to the description of the thermodynamic properties of quantum fluids at finite temperatures. First, we use path integral Monte Carlo (PIMC) simulations to estimate the thermodynamic/static properties of our model quantum fluid, i.e. low-density 4He at 10 K. With PIMC we obtain the experimental equation of state, the single-particle mean kinetic energy, the single-particle density matrix and the single-particle momentum distribution of this system at low densities. We show that our PIMC results are in full agreement with experimental data obtained with deep inelastic neutron scattering at high momentum transfers (D. Colognesi, C. Andreani, R. Senesi, Europhys. Lett., 2000, 50, 202).