Landau was the first to advance hydrodynamic concepts such as density and velocity to describe the superfluidity of liquid He$^4$. Due to the recent spectacular success of experiments demonstrating Bose Einstein condensation in dilute Bose atomic gases, interest has been revitalized in the theoretical description of Bose Einstein condensates. Many of the properties of these gases were obtained by using the Gross-Pitaevskii equation (GPE) to derive the hydrodynamic equations for the gases. However, it is interesting to apply the hydrodynamic equations obtained by Yee for bosons. Many of the properties obtained for the dilute Bose gases are also consequences of Yee's hydrodynamic equations, which derive from a formalism distinct from that of the GPE.
Landau was the first to advance hydrodynamic concepts such as density and velocity to describe the superfluidity of liquid He4. Due to the recent spectacular success of experiments demonstrating Bose Einstein condensation in dilute Bose atomic gases, interest has been revitalized in the theoretical description of Bose Einstein condensates. Many of the properties of these gases were obtained by using the Gross-Pitaevskii equation (GPE) to derive the hydrodynamic equations for the gases. However, it is interesting to apply the hydrodynamic equations obtained by Yee for bosons. Many of the properties obtained for the dilute Bose gases are also consequences of Yee's hydrodynamic equations, which derive from a formalism distinct from that of the GPE.
The Gross–Pitaevskii equation (GPE) is discussed at the level of an advanced course on statistical physics. In the standard literature the GPE is usually obtained in the framework of the second quantization formalism, which in many cases goes beyond the material covered in many advanced undergraduate courses. In this paper, we motivate the derivation of the GPE in relationship to concepts from statistical physics, highlighting a number of applications from the dynamics of a Bose–Einstein condensate to the excitations of the gas cloud. This paper may be helpful for encouraging the discussion of modern developments in a statistical mechanics course, and can also be of use in other contexts such as mathematical physics and modelling. The paper is suitable for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as for general physicists.
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 L2-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
In this chapter, we review the famous Landau theory of superfluidity at finite temperatures. This theory is based on coupled hydrodynamic equations for the superfluid and normal fluid components. Landau's two-fluid description is only valid when collisions among the thermal excitations making up the normal fluid are strong enough to produce local hydrodynamic equilibrium. These two-fluid equations were originally developed for liquid. He but are thought to be generic in form, describing the collision-dominated hydrodynamic region of all Bose superfluids. In this chapter, we will consider the solutions of the two-fluid equations mainly for a uniform superfluid. We discuss the existence of second sound (involving the out-of-phase motion of the superfluid and normal fluid components) as a characteristic feature of a Bose superfluid at finite temperatures. This chapter gives background material needed for Chapters 15–19. In Chapter 15, we will show that, in the appropriate limit, the Landau two-fluid equations can be derived from the ZNG coupled equations given in Chapter 3 for a trapped dilute Bose-condensed gas. In Chapters 17–19, we extend this discussion and derive the Landau–Khalatnikov two-fluid equations, which include hydrodynamic damping associated with various transport coefficients. Useful reviews of the two-fluid equations in the context of dilute spatially uniform Bose-condensed gases are given by Pethick and Smith (2008, Chapter 10) and Pitaevskii and Stringari (2003, Chapter 6). History of two-fluid equations The original discovery of superfluidity in liquid He was dramatically announced with the publication of the famous back-to-back papers of Kapitza (1938) in Moscow and Allen and Misener (1938) in Cambridge. These and subsequent experiments in the next few years showed that superfluid He could exhibit very bizarre hydrodynamic behaviour compared to classical liquids.
Since the dramatic discovery of Bose–Einstein condensation (BEC) in trapped atomic gases in 1995 (Anderson et al. , 1995), there has been an explosion of theoretical and experimental research on the properties of Bose-condensed dilute gases. The first phase of this research was discussed in the influential review article by Dalfovo et al. (1999) and in the proceedings of the 1998 Varenna Summer School on BEC (Inguscio et al. , 1999). More recently, this research has been well documented in two monographs, by Pethick and Smith (2008, second edition) and by Pitaevskii and Stringari (2003). Most of this research, both experimental and theoretical, has concentrated on the case of low temperatures (well below the BEC transition temperature, T BEC ), where one is effectively dealing with a pure Bose condensate. The total fraction of noncondensate atoms in such experiments can be as small as 10% of the total number of atoms and, equally importantly, this low-density cloud of thermally excited atoms is spread over a much larger spatial region compared with the high-density condensate, which is localized at the centre of the trapping potential. Thus most studies of Bose-condensed gases at low temperatures have concentrated entirely on the condensate degree of freedom and its response to various perturbations. This region is well described by the famous Gross–Pitaevskii (GP) equation of motion for the condensate order parameter Φ( r , t ). As shown by research since 1995, this pure condensate domain is very rich in physics. The main goal of the present book, in contrast, is to describe the dynamics of dilute trapped atomic gases at finite temperatures such that the noncondensate atoms also play an important role.
In Chapter 15, we showed that in the limit of short collision times the coupled equations of motion for the condensate and noncondensate atoms lead to Landau's non-dissipative two-fluid hydrodynamics. However the approach used in Chapter 15 was not based on a small expansion parameter, in contrast with the more systematic Chapman–Enskog procedure used to derive hydrodynamic damping in the kinetic theory of classical gases. In the present chapter, we generalize the procedure of Chapter 15 to trapped Bose-condensed gases, in order to derive two-fluid hydrodynamic equations that include dissipation due to transport processes. We solve the kinetic equation by expanding the nonequilibrium single-particle distribution function f ( p, r , t ) around the distribution function f (0) ( p, r , t ) that describes complete local equilibrium between the condensate and the noncondensate components. All hydrodynamic damping effects are included by taking into account deviations from the local equilibrium distribution function f (0) . Our discussion for a trapped Bose gas is a natural extension of the pioneering work of Kirkpatrick and Dorfman (1983, 1985a) for a uniform Bose-condensed gas. This chapter is mainly based on their work as well as on Nikuni and Griffin (2001a,b). We will prove that, with appropriate definitions of various thermodynamic variables, our two-fluid hydrodynamic equations including damping have precisely the structure of those first derived by Landau and Khalatnikov for superfluid He. In particular, the damping associated with the collisional exchange of atoms between the condensate and noncondensate components, which is discussed at length in Chapter 15, is now expressed in terms of frequency-dependent second viscosity coefficients. This special type of damping is a characteristic signature of a dilute Bose superfluid and exists in addition to the hydrodynamic damping associated with the shear viscosity and thermal conductivity of the normal fluid.
Bose-Einstein condensation is a quantum statistical phase transition which was theoretically predicted almost a hundred years ago. After years of seminal research, physicists realized the first almost ideal Bose-Einstein condensates in ultracold dilute atomic gases in 1995. Since then, the theoretical and experimental methods concerning such systems have been developing rapidly, and many fascinating phenomena have been found in these novel quantum systems.\n\nBose-Einstein condensation occurs in a system consisting of massive bosons when a single quantum state becomes macroscopically occupied as the temperature is lowered below the transition temperature. In general, condensates consisting of repulsively interacting bosons exhibit superfluidity: Particle currents can flow in the system without dissipation and viscosity. Moreover, the velocity fields of condensates have to be irrotational, which severely restricts the rotational characteristics of these systems. Apart from the center of mass motion, the system may carry angular momentum in the form of elementary excitations or so-called quantized vortices.\n\nThis Thesis is a theoretical study of subjects related to stability and dynamics of quantized vortices in dilute atomic Bose-Einstein condensates. The precession and instability of off-centered vortices in trapped condensates is investigated both in the zero-temperature limit and at finite temperatures. Dynamical stability of multiply quantized vortices and vortex clusters is studied in axisymmetric trap geometries. Splitting of energetically and dynamically unstable multiply quantized vortices into singly quantized vortices is also studied. Finally, as a separate subject, tunneling of a condensate through a potential barrier is investigated. Majority of this work relies on numerical methods for solving the Gross-Pitaevskii and Bogoliubov equations, which are of central importance in the study of dilute atomic Bose-Einstein condensates.