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Comptes Rendus Physique

Kinetic models for superfluids: a review of mathematical results

Laure Saint‐Raymond

Published Jan 1, 2004• 12 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The mathematical contributions by X.G. Lu (J. Statist. Phys. 98 (5/6) (2000) 1335–1394) and by M. Escobedo et al. (Electronic J. Differential Equations, Monograph 4 (2003)) presented in this Note constitute the first stage in the understanding of the superfluid dynamics, especially of the Bose–Einstein condensation, by means of kinetic models. The Boltzmann–Nordheim equation, which is physically relevant to describe dilute quantum Bose gases, sets important mathematical problems. Nevertheless, under an unphysical truncation of the collision cross-section at low energies, it has been proved that the spatially homogeneous Cauchy problem is well-posed. Furthermore, relaxation towards equilibrium holds in a weak sense, with the appearance of a singularity in infinite time if the initial mass is supercritical, which corresponds to the formation of a Bose–Einstein condensate.

DOI
10.1016/j.crhy.2004.01.005

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The mathematical contributions by X.G. Lu (J. Statist. Phys. 98 (5/6) (2000) 1335–1394) and by M. Escobedo et al. (Electronic J. Differential Equations, Monograph 4 (2003)) presented in this Note constitute the first stage in the understanding of the superfluid dynamics, especially of the Bose–Einstein condensation, by means of kinetic models. The Boltzmann–Nordheim equation, which is physically relevant to describe dilute quantum Bose gases, sets important mathematical problems. Nevertheless, under an unphysical truncation of the collision cross-section at low energies, it has been proved that the spatially homogeneous Cauchy problem is well-posed. Furthermore, relaxation towards equilibrium holds in a weak sense, with the appearance of a singularity in infinite time if the initial mass is supercritical, which corresponds to the formation of a Bose–Einstein condensate.
We study the bosonic Boltzmann-Nordheim kinetic equation, which describes the kinetic regime of weakly interacting bosons with s-wave scattering only.We consider a spatially homogeneous fluid with an isotropic momentum distribution.The issue of the dynamical formation of a Bose-Einstein condensate has been studied extensively.We supply here the completed equations of motion for the coupled system, the energy density distribution of the normal fluid and the density of the condensate.With this information the post-nucleation self-similar solution is investigated in more detail than before.We use throughout dimensionless variables in units which minimize the number of prefactors.The physically correct dimensions are supplied, e.g., in [1].Instead of denoting the energy by ε it will be more convenient to use the neutral x, y, z.The distribution function is denoted by f (x), f ≥ 0, with volume element √ xdx, x ≥ 0,
We study the bosonic Boltzmann-Nordheim kinetic equation, which describes the kinetic regime of weakly interacting bosons with s-wave scattering only. We consider a spatially homogeneous fluid with an isotropic momentum distribution. The issue of the dynamical formation of a Bose-Einstein condensate has been studied extensively. We supply here the completed equations of motion for the coupled system, the energy density distribution of the normal fluid and the density of the condensate. With this information the post-nucleation self-similar solution is investigated in more detail than before.
In this article we discuss the role played by kinetic theory in describing the non-equilibrium dynamics of dilute systems of weakly interacting bosons. We illustrate how a simple kinetic equation for the time evolution of the spectral particle density can be derived from the spatially homogeneous Gross–Pitaevskii equation. This kinetic equation agrees with the usual Boltzmann–Nordheim equation of quantum kinetic theory in the long wavelength limit where the occupation numbers are expected to be large. The stationary solutions of the Gross–Pitaevskii kinetic equation are described. These include both thermodynamic equilibrium spectra and finite flux Kolmogorov–Zakharov spectra. These latter spectra are intrinsically nonequilibrium states and are expected to be relevant in the transfer of particles to low momenta in the initial stage of the condensation process. This is illustrated by some computations of a solution of the kinetic equation beginning with initial conditions far from equilibrium. The solution generates a flux of particles from large to small momenta which results in a singularity at zero momentum within finite time. We interpret this singularity as incipient condensate formation. We then present some numerical results on the post-singularity dynamics and the approach to equilibrium. Contrary to our original expectations we do not observe the Kolmogorov–Zakharov spectrum during the period of condensate growth. In the closing sections we address the issue of the connection between the Gross–Pitaevskii and Boltzmann–Nordheim kinetic equations. We argue that the two equations have differing regimes of applicability in momentum space, matching in an intermediate range. We make some suggestions of how this matching can be modeled in practice.
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
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.
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.