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arXiv:2011.06339 · New Journal of Physics

Thermodynamics of trapped photon gases at dimensional crossover from 2D to 1D

Enrico Stein, Axel Pelster

Published Jan 25, 2022• 7 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Abstract Photon Bose–Einstein condensates are characterised by a quite weak interaction, so they behave nearly as an ideal Bose gas. Moreover, since the current experiments are conducted in a microcavity, the longitudinal motion is frozen out and the photon gas represents effectively a two-dimensional trapped gas of massive bosons. In this paper we focus on a harmonically confined ideal Bose gas in two dimensions, where the anisotropy of the confinement allows for a dimensional crossover. If the confinement in one direction is strong enough so that this squeezed direction is frozen out, then only one degree of freedom survives and the system can be considered to be quasi-one dimensional. In view of an experimental set-up we work out analytically the thermodynamic properties for such a system with a finite number of photons. In particular, we focus on examining the dimensional information which is contained in the respective thermodynamic quantities.

DOI
10.1088/1367-2630/ac4ee0

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Abstract Photon Bose–Einstein condensates are characterised by a quite weak interaction, so they behave nearly as an ideal Bose gas. Moreover, since the current experiments are conducted in a microcavity, the longitudinal motion is frozen out and the photon gas represents effectively a two-dimensional trapped gas of massive bosons. In this paper we focus on a harmonically confined ideal Bose gas in two dimensions, where the anisotropy of the confinement allows for a dimensional crossover. If the confinement in one direction is strong enough so that this squeezed direction is frozen out, then only one degree of freedom survives and the system can be considered to be quasi-one dimensional. In view of an experimental set-up we work out analytically the thermodynamic properties for such a system with a finite number of photons. In particular, we focus on examining the dimensional information which is contained in the respective thermodynamic quantities.
For many-body quantum systems, dimensionality is known to exert a profound influence on the physical behaviour, allowing for the shaping of distinct phases of matter. In general, for lower dimensions, enhanced fluctuations serve to suppress long range order. For bosonic gases, for example, Bose-Einstein condensation in one dimension requires confinement that is stronger than linear in order to occur, in contrast to two-dimensional systems where harmonic confinement can suffice. In this thesis, the dimensional crossover between one and two dimensions in a harmonically trapped photon gas has been experimentally investigated. The photons were confined within a dye filled optical microcavity, where polymer nanostructures produced by direct laser writing defined the trapping potential. By systematically adjusting the aspect ratio of the harmonic trap, the confinement was varied from an isotropic two dimensional regime to a highly anisotropic one dimensional regime. The caloric properties of the photon gas were characterised across this transition, revealing that the sharp phase transition observed in two dimensions evolves into a smooth crossover in one dimension. This work enhances understanding of thermodynamic behaviour in photon Bose gases under confinement and demonstrates that here dimensionality can be used to tailor phase transition phenomena. Furthermore, polymer cavities fabricated via direct laser writing afforded precise control over the confinement geometry, enabling exploration of variable potential landscapes. Proof of concept studies of advanced geometries, previously inaccessible, are presented, opening new directions for research in driven dissipative Bose gases and photonic quantum simulation platforms.
Our experimental scheme is based on a barrel optical microresonator filled with a dye solution. The barrel mirror provides a confining potential, a chemical potential, and an effective mass for a photon, making the system formally equivalent to a one-dimensional gas of harmonically trapped, number-conserving, and massive bosons. Within the framework of quantum statistical mechanics, we propose an exact analytical solution to the problem of Bose-Einstein condensation in harmonically trapped, one-dimensional, and ideal photons. It is found that the photon number of vapor is characterized by an analytical function, which involves a qqq-digamma function in mathematics. The numerical calculation of the analytical solution gives many interesting results. In the thermodynamic limit, the analytical expressions of the critical temperature and the condensate fraction are derived. We find that the spectral radiance of a one-dimensional barrel cavity has a sharp peak at the frequency of the cavity cutoff when the photon number exceeds the critical value determined by a temperature.
Abstract Since the advent of experiments with photon Bose–Einstein condensates (phBECs) in dye-filled microcavities in 2010, many investigations have focussed upon the emerging effective photon–photon interaction. Despite its smallness, it can be identified to stem from two physically distinct mechanisms. On the one hand, a Kerr nonlinearity of the dye medium yields a photon–photon contact interaction. On the other hand, a heating of the dye medium leads to an additional thermo-optic interaction, which is both delayed and non-local. The latter turns out to represent the leading contribution to the effective interaction for the current 2D experiments. Here we analyse theoretically how the effective photon–photon interaction increases when the system dimension is reduced from 2D to 1D. To this end, we consider an anisotropic harmonic trapping potential and determine via a variational approach how the properties of the phBEC in general, and both aforementioned interaction mechanisms in particular, change with increasing anisotropy. We find that the thermo-optic interaction strength increases at first linearly with the trap aspect ratio and later on saturates at a certain value of the trap aspect ratio. Furthermore, in the strong 1D limit the roles of both interactions get reversed as the thermo-optic interaction remains saturated and the contact Kerr interaction becomes the leading interaction mechanism. Finally, we discuss how the predicted effects can be measured experimentally.
We study theoretically the dimensional crossover from a three-dimensional elongated condensate to a one-dimensional condensate as the transverse degrees of freedom get frozen by tight confinement, in the limit of small density fluctuations, i.e. for a strongly degenerate gas. We compute analytically the radially integrated density profile at low temperatures using a local density approximation, and study the behavior of phase fluctuations with the transverse confinement. Previous studies of phase fluctuations in trapped gases have either focused on the 3D elongated regimes or on the 1D regime. The present approach recovers these previous results and is able to interpolate between them. We show in particular that in this strongly degenerate limit the shape of the spatial correlation function is insensitive to the transverse regime of confinement, pointing out to an almost universal behavior of phase fluctuations in elongated traps.
We discuss the transition from a fully decoherent to a (quasi)condensate regime in a harmonically trapped weakly interacting one-dimensional (1D) Bose gas. By using analytic approaches and verifying them against exact numerical solutions, we find a characteristic crossover temperature and crossover atom number that depend on the interaction strength and the trap frequency. We then identify the conditions for observing either an interaction-induced crossover scenario or else a finite-size Bose-Einstein condensation phenomenon characteristic of an ideal trapped 1D gas.
We study Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) for a non-interacting gas in a very anisotropic trap. Therefore, at enough small temperatures some degrees of freedom "freeze", thus reducing the "effective" dimensionality of the system. We mainly focus in quasi-bidimensional traps characterized by a surface S in the (x, y) plane. We consider two confining mechanisms in the z direction: harmonic and rigid wall potentials. There are not forces parallel to S, excepting the rigid wall at the edges. The most relevant results are: (a) The condensate smoothly sets at T ∼ script O sign(Tc/ log N), where Tc is the tridimensional condensation temperature. (b) When BEC is present, also the low-lying excited states have a macroscopic occupation; this effect is also present in a quasi-onedimensional harmonic "cigar-shape" trap. (c) The condensation process is sensitive to the shape of S.