The surface of liquid4He at nonzero temperatures

We outline a general approach to microscopic evaluation of the properties of strongly interacting, spatially inhomogeneous Bose systems at finite temperatures. A minimum principle for the Helmholtz free energy is used together with an appropriate trial density matrix to generalize the correlated variational wave function theory that has proven so successful in the treatment of the ground states and elementary excitations of quantum fluids at zero temperature. Euler-Lagrange equations are obtained that determine the optimal structure through the one-and two-body densities and the optimal density fluctuation operators and energies characterizing the elementary excitations. Some results of an application of this correlated density matrix theory to the⁴He liquid-vapor interface are presented, with particular focus on the characterization of resonant vapor modes.