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Modeling and simulation in science, engineering & technology

Quantum kinetic theory: modelling and numerics for Bose-Einstein condensation

Weizhu Bao, Lorenzo Pareschi, Peter A. Markowich

Published Jan 1, 2004• 10 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We review some modelling and numerical aspects in quantum kinetic theory for a gas of interacting bosons and we try to explain what makes Bose-Einstein condensation in a dilute gas mathematically interesting and numerically challenging. Particular care is devoted to the development of efficient numerical schemes for the quantum Boltzmann equation that preserve the main physical features of the continuous problem, namely conservation of mass and energy, the entropy inequality and generalized Bose-Einstein distributions as steady states. These properties are essential in order to develop numerical methods that are able to capture the challenging phenomenon of bosons condensation. We also show that the resulting schemes can be evaluated with the use of fast algorithms. In order to study the evolution of the condensate wave function the Gross-Pitaevskii equation is presented together with some schemes for its efficient numerical solution. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

DOI
10.1007/978-0-8176-8200-2_10

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We review some modelling and numerical aspects in quantum kinetic theory for a gas of interacting bosons and we try to explain what makes Bose-Einstein condensation in a dilute gas mathematically interesting and numerically challenging. Particular care is devoted to the development of efficient numerical schemes for the quantum Boltzmann equation that preserve the main physical features of the continuous problem, namely conservation of mass and energy, the entropy inequality and generalized Bose-Einstein distributions as steady states. These properties are essential in order to develop numerical methods that are able to capture the challenging phenomenon of bosons condensation. We also show that the resulting schemes can be evaluated with the use of fast algorithms. In order to study the evolution of the condensate wave function the Gross-Pitaevskii equation is presented together with some schemes for its efficient numerical solution. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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 L2L^2L2-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\textit{Full-text embargoed until: 2026-01-01}Full-text embargoed until: 2026-01-01
In this paper, we mainly review recent results on mathematical theory andnumerical methods for Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC),based on the Gross-Pitaevskii equation (GPE). Starting from the simplest case with one-component BEC of the weakly interacting bosons, we study the reduction of GPE to lower dimensions, the ground states of BEC including the existence and uniqueness as well as nonexistence results, and the dynamics of GPE including dynamical laws, well-posedness of the Cauchy problem as well as the finite time blow-up. To compute the ground state, the gradient flow with discrete normalization (or imaginary time) method is reviewed and various full discretization methods are presented and compared. To simulate the dynamics, both finite difference methods and time splitting spectral methods are reviewed, and their error estimates are briefly outlined. When the GPE has symmetric properties, we show how to simplify the numerical methods. Then we compare two widely used scalings, i.e. physical scaling (commonly used) and semiclassical scaling, for BEC in strong repulsive interaction regime (Thomas-Fermi regime), and discuss semiclassical limits of the GPE. Extensions of these results for one-component BEC are thencarried out for rotating BEC by GPE with an angular momentum rotation, dipolar BEC by GPE with long range dipole-dipole interaction, and two-component BEC by coupled GPEs. Finally, as a perspective, we show briefly the mathematical models forspin-1 BEC, Bogoliubov excitation and BEC at finite temperature.
The achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) in ultracold vapors of alkali atoms has given enormous impulse to the theoretical and experimental study of dilute atomic gases in condensed quantum states inside magnetic traps and optical lattices. This article offers a short survey on mathematical models and theories as well as numerical methods for BEC based on the mean field theory. We start with the Gross-Pitaevskii equation (GPE) in three dimensions (3D) for modeling one-component BEC of the weakly interacting bosons, scale it to obtain a three-parameter model and show how to reduce it to two dimensions (2D) and one dimension (1D) GPEs in certain limiting regimes. Mathematical theories and numerical methods for ground states and dynamics of BEC are provided. Extensions to GPE with an angular momentum rotation term for a rotating BEC, to GPE with long-range anisotropic dipole-dipole interaction for a dipolar BEC and to coupled GPEs for spin-orbit coupled BECs are discussed. Finally, some conclusions are drawn and future research perspectives are discussed.
We study a quantum Boltzmann-Condensation system that describes the evolution of the interaction between a well formed Bose-Einstein condensate and the quasi-particles cloud. The kinetic model is valid for a dilute regime at which the temperature of the gas is very low compared to the Bose-Einstein condensation critical temperature. In particular, our system couples the density of the condensate from a Gross-Pitaevskii type equation to the kinetic equation through the dispersion relation in the kinetic model and the corresponding transition probability rate from pre to post collision momentum states. We rigorously show the following three properties (1) the well-posedness of the Cauchy problem for the system in the case of a radially symmetric initial configuration, (2) find qualitative properties of the solution such as instantaneous creation of exponential tails and, (3) prove the uniform condensate stability related to the initial mass ratio between condensed particles and quasi-particles. The stability result from (3) leads to global in time existence of the initial value problem for the quantum Boltzmann-Condensation system.
We discuss the equivalence of two nonequilibrium kinetic theories that describe the evolution of a dilute, Bose-Einstein condensed atomic gas in a harmonic trap. The second-order kinetic equations of Walser et al. [Phys. Rev. A 63, 013607 (2001)] reduce to the Gross-Pitaevskii equation and the quantum Boltzmann equation in the low- and high-temperature limits, respectively. These kinetic equations thus describe the system in equilibrium (finite temperature) as well as in nonequilibrium (real time). We have found this theory to be equivalent to the nonequilibrium Green's function approach originally proposed by Kadanoff and Baym and more recently applied to inhomogeneous trapped systems by Imamovi\ifmmode \acute{c}\else \'{c}\fi{}-Tomasovi\ifmmode \acute{c}\else \'{c}\fi{} and Griffin [in Progress in Nonequilibrium Green's Functions, edited by M. Bonitz (World Scientific, Singapore, 2000), p. 404].