arXiv:1310.6621 · Physical Review A
Reduced dimensionality and spatial entanglement in highly anisotropic Bose-Einstein condensates
Alexandre B. Tacla, Carlton M. Caves
Abstract
We investigate the reduced dimensionality of highly anisotropic Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) in connection with the entanglement between the spatial degrees of freedom. We argue that the reduced dimensionality of the BEC is physically meaningful in a regime where spatial correlations are negligible. We handle the problem analytically within the mean-field approximation for general quasi-one-dimensional and quasi-two-dimensional geometries and obtain the optimal reduced-dimension, pure-state description of the condensate mean field. We give explicit solutions for the case of harmonic potentials, which we compare against exact numerical integration of the three-dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii equation.