Popov approximation for composite bosons in the BCS-BEC crossover

Theoretical treatments of the BCS-BEC crossover need to provide as accurate as possible descriptions of the two regimes where the diluteness condition applies, either in terms of the constituent fermions in the BCS limit or of the composite bosons which form as bound-fermion pairs in the BEC limit. This has to occur via a single fermionic theory that bridges across these two limiting representations. In this paper, we set up successive improvements of the fermionic theory, that result into composite bosons described at the level of either the Bogoliubov or the Popov approximations for pointlike bosons. This work bears on the recent experimental advances on the BCS-BEC crossover with trapped Fermi atoms, which show the need for accurate theoretical descriptions of the BEC side of the crossover.