arXiv:1502.00933 · Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics Letters
Origin of a nonlinear contribution to the shift of the critical temperature in atomic Bose-Einstein condensates
S. Sergeenkov, Fabio Briscese, M. Grether, M. de Llano
Abstract
We discuss a possible origin of the experimentally observed nonlinear contribution to the shift ΔT c = T c − T 0 of the critical temperature T c in an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) with respect to the critical temperature T 0 of an ideal gas. We found that accounting for a nonlinear (quadratic) Zeeman effect (with applied magnetic field closely matching a Feshbach resonance field B 0) in the mean-field approximation results in a rather significant renormalization of the field-free nonlinear contribution b 2, namely, T c /T 0 ≃ b 2* (a/λ T )2 (where a is the s-wave scattering length, λ T is the thermal wavelength at T 0 ) with b 2* = γ2 b 2 and γ = γ(B 0). In particular, we predict b 2* ≃ 42.3 for the B 0 ≃ 403 G resonance observed in the 39K BEC.