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arXiv:0708.2234

Bose-Einstein condensation of a Knudsen gas

Kersion Huang

Published Aug 16, 2007• 1 citation
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Abstract

We reconcile a long-standing controversy regarding the transition temperature of the Bose-Einstein condensation in a dilute interacting Bose gas, by showing that there is a crossover between ideal gas and interacting gas. The former corresponds to a Knudsen (or collisionless) regime, in which the mean-free-path is much larger than the system dimension, while the latter corresponds to the opposite hydrodynamic regime. The deviation of the transition temperature from that of the non-interacting gas is proportional to the square root of a in the Knudsen regime, and to a in the hydrodynamic regime, where a is the scattering length. This crossover may be observable in a Bose gas trapped in a potential or on an optical lattice.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.0708.2234

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We reconcile a long-standing controversy regarding the transition temperature of the Bose-Einstein condensation in a dilute interacting Bose gas, by showing that there is a crossover between ideal gas and interacting gas. The former corresponds to a Knudsen (or collisionless) regime, in which the mean-free-path is much larger than the system dimension, while the latter corresponds to the opposite hydrodynamic regime. The deviation of the transition temperature from that of the non-interacting gas is proportional to the square root of a in the Knudsen regime, and to a in the hydrodynamic regime, where a is the scattering length. This crossover may be observable in a Bose gas trapped in a potential or on an optical lattice.
Quantum systems consisting of many particles are both interesting from the physics and the mathematics perspective. One aspect that makes them fascinating from the physics point of view is that they can exhibit quantum effects on macroscopic scales such as Bose-Einstein condensation. This phenomenon, first predicted 100 years ago by Bose [19] and Einstein [44], occurs when a dilute gas of bosons is cooled down to very low temperatures. Below a certain critical temperature a condensate forms, meaning that a macroscopic fraction of the particles is in the same one-particle state, and thus, quantum phenomena become relevant on length scales much larger than the individual atom. The occurrence of Bose-Einstein condensation is also related to superfluidity as suggested in [88]. Bose-Einstein condensation has been achieved experimentally independently by the groups of Cornell and Wieman [3] and Ketterle [40] earning them a Nobel prize in 2001. While Bose and Einstein analyzed theoretically the non-interacting gas, an effective theory describing weakly interacting Bose gases was proposed by Bogoliubov in 1947 with the goal of explaining the occurrence of superfluidity in liquid helium [18]. Using assumptions such as that condensation indeed occurs, his theory yields predictions for the low-energy states of the system. Seen from the mathematics perspective, describing the Bose gas is an interesting challenge due to the strong correlations between particles introduced by the interaction making this case much harder to study than the non-interacting one. In particular, a proof that Bose-Einstein condensation occurs in the thermodynamic limit for continuous systems is still out of reach. However, there has been a lot of work regarding the rigorous analysis of bosonic systems in various relevant regimes. This thesis contains three new contributions establishing rigorous results on bosonic systems in different, physically relevant settings. It is based on the articles [37, 27, 31]. The first result concerns the time-evolution of initially trapped Bose gases in the ultra-dilute Gross-Pitaevskii regime. Under some assumptions on the initial data satisfied in particular by a class of states that are expected to approximate the ground state in a trap, we derive a quasi-free approximation that is close to the true solution in L2L^2L2-norm. In particular, we show that this approximate wave function is described in terms of a Bose-Einstein condensate in a one-particle state following the time-dependent Gross-Pitaevskii equation together with pair excitations with respect to this condensate. As a corollary, we establish a central limit theorem for bounded one-particle observables. The second result is a simple proof of Bose-Einstein condensation for interacting, ultra-dilute gases. More specifically, we consider scalings interpolating between the Gross-Pitaevskii regime and the thermodynamic limit. While condensation had been shown to hold in these regimes before, the advantage of the method used here is its simplicity. Lastly, the third result establishes an upper bound on the ground state energy of a dilute Bose gas in the thermodynamic limit. It captures rigorously the third order correction to the energy per unit volume for sufficiently low densities as predicted in the physics literature first by Wu and subsequently others. Full-text embargoed until: 2026-01-01\textit{Full-text embargoed until: 2026-01-01}Full-text embargoed until: 2026-01-01
We calculate the Bose-Einstein-condensate (BEC) occupation statistics vs the interparticle interaction in a dilute gas with a nonuniform condensate in a box trap within the Bogoliubov approach. The results are compared against the previously found BEC-occupation statistics in (i) an ideal gas and (ii) a weakly interacting gas with a uniform condensate. In particular, we reveal and explicitly describe an appearance of a nontrivial transition from the ideal gas to the Thomas-Fermi regime. The results include finding the main regimes of the BEC statistics---the anomalous non-Gaussian thermally dominated fluctuations and the Gaussian quantum-dominated fluctuations---as well as a crossover between them and their manifestations in a mesoscopic system. Remarkably, we show that the effect of the boundary conditions, imposed at the box trap, on the BEC fluctuations does not vanish in the thermodynamic limit of a macroscopic system even in the presence of the interparticle interactions. Finally, we discuss a challenging problem of an experimental verification of the theory of the BEC fluctuations addressing a much deeper level of the many-body statistical physics than usually studied quantities related to the mean condensate occupation.
We consider an interacting, dilute Bose gas trapped in a harmonic potential at a positive temperature. The system is analyzed in a combination of a thermodynamic and a Gross–Pitaevskii (GP) limit where the trap frequency ω{\omega}ω , the temperature T, and the particle number N are related by N∼(T/ω)3→∞{N \sim (T / \omega)^{3} \to\infty}N∼(T/ω)3→∞ while the scattering length is so small that the interaction energy per particle around the center of the trap is of the same order of magnitude as the spectral gap in the trap. We prove that the difference between the canonical free energy of the interacting gas and the one of the noninteracting system can be obtained by minimizing the GP energy functional. We also prove Bose–Einstein condensation in the following sense: The one-particle density matrix of any approximate minimizer of the canonical free energy functional is to leading order given by that of the noninteracting gas but with the free condensate wavefunction replaced by the GP minimizer.
The field of Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) in dilute atomic gases provides a fruitful playground to test well-developed theories of quantum fluids. Research using BECs can address open questions relating to the many-body aspects of two-component quantum liquids, namely the interaction between the hydrodynamic normal and the superfluid component at finite temperatures. After the first realization of BEC some pilot experiments have been carried out, but detailed experiments are missing. This has to be compared to the case of liquid helium II, where many experiments since the 1950s have added to our understanding of novel phenomena in quantum liquids, like collective excitations, first and second sound, and others. One of the drawbacks of liquid helium is that the interactions are so strong that a clear distinction between the two components is difficult and the interpretation of the phenomena remains ambiguous. Most experimental studies of dilute Bose-Einstein condensed gases use clouds, which are in the collisionless regime. The reason for the lack of detailed experiments in BECs to study quantum liquids and in particular the hydrodynamical aspects of it, is the limited number of atoms (typically 1--10 million) in the experiments leaving the thermal atoms virtually collisionless. Efforts to decrease the mean free path by increasing the confinement limits the lifetime of the sample, since the density is limited by three-body decay. Experiments on dilute clouds of cold atoms are generally conducted in highly asymmetric traps. In these elongated, cigar-shaped geometries the mean free path of the atoms can become much shorter than the size of the cloud in the long, axial direction, but at the same time exceeds the size in the other, radial directions. In this so-called hydrodynamic-collisionless regime the system can be considered radially collisionless and axially hydrodynamic. In our setup we have created BECs containing up to 300 million sodium atoms by evaporation of atoms in an axially strongly decompressed trap with an aspect ratio of 1:65. Hot atoms created in three-body collisions are able to leave the sample in this highly asymmetric trap, before they can heat other atoms in an avalanche. The sample is axially hydrodynamic, but due to the large aspect ratio collisionless in the radial direction. Such samples are ideal for the observation of the interaction between the superfluid and normal fluid component of the cloud. In this thesis we describe the setup which is used to reach the hydrodynamic regime and we describe a novel implementation of the well-known phase contrast imaging technique. Next, we study collective excitations in the crossover from the collisionless toward the hydrodynamic regime, we determine the heat conduction in a cold, hydrodynamic thermal cloud and observe the propagation of a thermal wave in the two-fluid regime. Furthermore, we study the friction between the superfluid and normal fluid component of the cloud. In the final chapters of this thesis we study the propagation of second sound, as well as the formation and propagation of shock waves.
The phase transition of the one-dimensional Bose gas, interacting weakly with a repulsive potential and trapped in an external parabolic potential, is studied in a mean field approximation. The Bose–Einstein condensed (BEC) state is identified by the non-vanishing thermal average of a bose field. Free energies between the BEC state and normal state are compared. A crossing of the free energies occurring at low temperature suggests the first order phase transition in an interacting one-dimensional bose system. From fitting of numerical results, the relation among the transition temperature T c , the total number of bosons N and the interaction V is also provided as a simple power law, T c ∝( N 2 V ) 2/3 .
Due to the observation of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute atomic 87^{87}87Rb and 23^{23}23Na vapors last year, there is currently a great interest in the properties of a degenerate Bose gas. One aspect that is not yet understood is the effect of the interatomic interactions on the critical temperature of the phase transition. We present here a renormalization group study of the weakly-interacting Bose gas and predict the critical temperature at which Bose-Einstein condensation occurs as a function of the (positive) scattering length aaa of the interatomic potential.