Functional Integral Approach to a Many Fermion System with Bound States

The equation of state for a dense system of interacting Fermions is derived using functional integral technique. To investigate the formation of bound states, a Hubbard-Stratonovich transformation is applied which expresses the action as functional of pair fields. The evaluation of the partition function in lowest orders with respect to the pair fields leads to a result which can be interpreted as the contribution of two-particle states, accounting for density corrections as Pauli blocking and self-energy shift. Comparison is performed with results for the equation of state of hot dense matter (plasmas, nuclear matter) obtained within a Green's function approach.