An improved calculation of the third virial coefficient of a free anyon gas

Abstract

For three anyons confined in a harmonic oscillator, only the class of states that interpolates nonlinearly with the statistical parameter contributes to the third virial coefficient of a free anyon gas. Rather than evaluating the full three-body partition function as was done in an earlier publication [J. Law, A. Suzuki, and R. Bhaduri, Phys. Rev. A 46, 4693 (1992)], here only the nonlinear contribution is calculated, thus avoiding delicate cancellations between the irrelevant linear part and the two-body partition function. Our numerical results are consistent with the simple analytical form suggested recently by Myrheim and Olaussen [Phys. Lett. B 299, 267 (1993)].