A grand-canonical approach to the disordered Bose gas

Abel Camacho, Alfredo Macı́as, A. Camacho-Galván

C. J. Pethick, H. Smith

Christoph Weiß, Jacques Tempere

Grand-canonical fluctuations of Bose-Einstein condensates of light are accessible to state-of-the-art experiments [J. Schmitt et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 030401 (2014).PRLTAO0031-900710.1103/PhysRevLett.112.030401]. We phenomenologically describe these fluctuations by using the grand-canonical ensemble for a weakly interacting Bose gas at thermal equilibrium. For a two-dimensional harmonic trap, we use two models for which the canonical partition functions of the weakly interacting Bose gas are given by exact recurrence relations. We find that the grand-canonical condensate fluctuations for weakly interacting Bose gases vanish at zero temperature, thus behaving qualitatively similarly to an ideal gas in the canonical ensemble (or microcanonical ensemble) rather than the grand-canonical ensemble. For low but finite temperatures, the fluctuations remain considerably higher than for the canonical ensemble, as predicted by the ideal gas in the grand-canonical ensemble, thus clearly showing that we are not in a regime in which the ensembles are equivalent.

Sebastiano Pilati, S. Giorgini, Nikolay V. Prokof'ev

The superfluid transition of a three-dimensional gas of hard-sphere bosons in a disordered medium is studied using quantum Monte Carlo methods. Simulations are performed in continuous space both in the canonical and in the grand-canonical ensemble. At fixed density we calculate the shift of the transition temperature as a function of the disorder strength, while at fixed temperature we determine both the critical chemical potential and the critical density separating normal and superfluid phases. In the regime of strong disorder the normal phase extends up to large values of the degeneracy parameter, and the critical chemical potential exhibits a linear dependence in the intensity of the random potential. The role of interactions and disorder correlations is also discussed.

C. J. Pethick, H. Smith

M. Fannes, André F. Verbeure