Motivated by the expected realization of a shell shaped BEC in microgravity I studied the thermodynamics of bosonic quantum gases confined on the surface of a sphere both in the ideal and in the interacting case. In particular, once I found the values of the parameters of the external potential that are such to confine the gas to the surface of a sphere I computed the critical temperature as a function of the total number of atoms, the condensate and the thermal density as a function of the radius both in the ideal and interacting case and finally also the condensate and thermal fraction are computed.
Ultracold quantum gases are highly controllable and thus capable of simulating difficult quantum many-body problems ranging from condensed matter physics to astrophysics. Although experimental realizations have so far been restricted to flat geometries, recently also curved quantum systems, with the prospect of exploring tunable geometries, have been produced in microgravity facilities as ground-based experiments are technically limited. Here, we analyze bubble-trapped condensates, in which the atoms are confined on the surface of a thin spherically symmetric shell by means of external magnetic fields. A thermally induced proliferation of vorticity yields a vanishing of superfluidity. We describe the occurrence of this topological transition by conceptually extending the theory of Berezinskii, Kosterlitz, and Thouless for infinite uniform systems to such finite-size systems. Unexpectedly, we find universal scaling relations for the mean critical temperature and the finite width of the superfluid transition. Furthermore, we elucidate how they could be experimentally observed in finite-temperature hydrodynamic excitations.
It is well known that Bose–Einstein condensation cannot occur in a free two-dimensional (2D) system. Recently, several studies have showed that BEC can occur on the surface of a sphere. We investigate BEC on the surface of cylinder on both sides of which atoms are confined in a one-dimensional (1D) harmonic potential. In this work, only the non-interacting Bose gas is considered. We determine the critical temperature and the condensate fraction in the geometry using the semi-classical approximation. Moreover, the thermodynamic properties of ideal bosons are also studied using the grand canonical partition function.
We analyze the scattering problem of identical bosonic particles confined on a spherical surface. At low scattering energies and for a radius much larger than the healing length, we express the contact interaction strength in terms of the
s-wave scattering length. Adopting this relation, we are then able to regularize the zero-point energy of the spherical Bose gas and to obtain its equation of state, which includes the corrections due to the finite radius of the sphere and coincides with the flat-case result in the infinite-radius limit. We also provide a microscopic derivation of the superfluid density of the system, reproducing a result postulated in a previous work. Our results are relevant for modeling the ongoing microgravity experiments with two-dimensional bubble-trapped Bose-Einstein condensates.
The recent developments of microgravity experiments with ultracold atoms have produced a relevant boost in the study of shell-shaped ellipsoidal Bose-Einstein condensates. For realistic bubble-trap parameters, here we calculate the critical temperature of Bose-Einstein condensation, which, if compared to the one of the bare harmonic trap with the same frequencies, shows a strong reduction. We simulate the zero-temperature density distribution with the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, and we study the free expansion of the hollow condensate. While part of the atoms expands in the outward direction, the condensate self-interferes inside the bubble trap, filling the hole in experimentally observable times. For a mesoscopic number of particles in a strongly interacting regime, for which more refined approaches are needed, we employ quantum Monte Carlo simulations, proving that the nontrivial topology of a thin shell allows superfluidity. Our work constitutes a reliable benchmark for the forthcoming scientific investigations with bubble traps.
According to Hohenberg's theorem, Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) in two dimensions is impossible for any temperature
T>0. By contrast, superfluidity does occur in two dimensions at finite temperatures; it emerges due to the breaking of Galilei invariance. Here we consider BEC and superfluidity on a compact two-dimensional space taking the form of a non-commutative ("fuzzy") sphere, where the scalar bosonic fields are promoted to
N×N matrices. The dimension
N is related to the non-commutativity parameter of space and introduces an additional scale into the system. We find that non-commutativity favors ordered phases and so enhances BEC and superfluidity. We analyze BEC in ideal and weakly interacting Bose gases on a fuzzy sphere, finding in each case that the critical temperature of BEC is greater compared to that found in the case of a commutative sphere
S2. Then we investigate the superfluid response of weakly interacting Bose systems. To account for vortices in a superfluid, we show that, even on an ordinary sphere, the collective coordinates of vortices induce non-commutativity. With this in mind, we extend the definition of vortex defects to an inherently non-commutative sphere studied here, where the notion of a point is untenable. The non-commutativity is expected to be experimentally relevant to BEC and superfluidity since the fuzzy sphere has a thermodynamic limit distinct from the one defined over a plane, unlike the
S2 case. The significance of this difference is illustrated by the superfluid density calculation indicating that, in the large sphere limit, the normal fluid fraction on the fuzzy sphere yields a linear in
T dependence, while on a commutative
S2 it exhibits the usual two-dimensional
∼T3 behavior. This linear dependence, arising directly from non-commutativity, is reminiscent of Uemura's law in cuprate high-
Tc superconductors.