Abstract
Motivated by the short coherence length of the high-temperature superconductors, we study in the negative-U Hubbard model the crossover from Cooper pairs for Ut to composite bosons for Ut. We compute the collective-mode spectrum using a generalized random-phase-approximation analysis within the equations-of-motion formalism. We find a smooth evolution of the Anderson mode for weak coupling into the Bogoliubov sound mode for hard-core bosons.