Abstract
We present a theory for a superfluid Fermi gas near the BCS-BEC crossover, including pairing fluctuation contributions to the free energy similar to that considered by Nozières and Schmitt-Rink for the normal phase. In the strong coupling limit, our theory is able to recover the Bogoliubov theory of a weakly interacting Bose gas with a molecular scattering length very close to the known exact result. We compare our results with recent Quantum Monte Carlo simulations both for the ground state and at finite temperature. Excellent agreement is found for all interaction strengths where simulation results are available.