We reconsider the procedure
developed for atoms a few decades ago by Girardeau, in the light of
the composite-boson many-body theory we recently proposed. The
Girardeau's procedure makes use of a so called “unitary Fock-Tani
operator” which in an exact way transforms one composite bound
atom into one bosonic “ideal” atom. When used to transform the
Hamiltonian of interacting atoms, this operator generates an extremely
complex set of effective scatterings between ideal bosonic atoms and free
fermions which makes the transformed Hamiltonian impossible to write
explicitly, in this way forcing to some truncation. The scatterings
restricted to the ideal-atom subspace are shown to read rather simply in
terms of the two elementary scatterings of the composite-boson many-body
theory, namely, the energy-like direct interaction scatterings
— which describe fermion interactions without fermion exchange — and
the dimensionless Pauli scatterings — which describe fermion exchanges
without fermion interaction. We here show
that, due to a fundamental difference in the scalar products of
elementary and composite bosons, the Hamiltonian expectation
value for N ground state atoms
obtained by staying in the ideal-atom subspace and working
with boson operators only, differ from the exact ones even for N = 2 and
a mapping to the ideal-atom subspace performed, as advocated, from
the fully antisymmetrical atomic state, i.e., the state which obeys the
so-called “subsidiary condition”. This shows that, within this
Girardeau's procedure too, we cannot completely forget the underlying
fermionic components of the particles if we want to correctly describe
their interactions.