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Physical Review A

Pair-correlation function of a metastable helium Bose-Einstein condensate

Paweł Zin, Marek Trippenbach, Mariusz Gajda

Published Feb 24, 2004• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The pair-correlation function is one of the basic quantities to characterize the coherence properties of a Bose-Einstein condensate. We calculate this function in the experimentally important case of a zero temperature Bose-Einstein condensate in a metastable triplet helium state using the variational method with a pair-excitation ansatz. We compare our result with a pair-correlation function obtained for the hard-sphere potential with the same scattering length. Both functions are practically indistinguishable for distances greater than the scattering length. At smaller distances, due to interatomic interactions, the helium condensate shows strong correlations.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.69.023614

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The pair-correlation function is one of the basic quantities to characterize the coherence properties of a Bose-Einstein condensate. We calculate this function in the experimentally important case of a zero temperature Bose-Einstein condensate in a metastable triplet helium state using the variational method with a pair-excitation ansatz. We compare our result with a pair-correlation function obtained for the hard-sphere potential with the same scattering length. Both functions are practically indistinguishable for distances greater than the scattering length. At smaller distances, due to interatomic interactions, the helium condensate shows strong correlations.
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The correlation effect on the molecular distance distribution in a Bose-Einstein gas is calculated as a function of volume and temperature, particularly for the case of degeneracy (condensation) of the gas. It is shown that, under certain conditions in the condensed state, the density as seen from any one molecule appears, over a rather extended region around it, to be considerably larger than the true density. This result seems to have direct relation to the fact that the low temperature modification of liquid helium has a negative coefficient of thermal expansion.
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Bose-Einstein condensation is described in terms of the condensate wave function and the pair-excitation function, the latter being responsible for the existence of phonons. This minimal description in terms of these two functions is generalized to the case with an external potential. For a dilute gas with short-range pairwise repulsive interaction and at very low temperatures when the Bose-Einstein condensation is nearly complete, a partial differential equation is obtained for the condensate wave function and an integro-differential equation for the pair excitation. Experimentally, the external potential is used to trap the atoms, i.e., to keep them together. Since the trap is of macroscopic dimensions, the resulting external potential is often slowly varying. In these cases and when the condensate is in the lowest state, the partial differential equation for the condensate wave function and the integro-differential equation for the pair excitation are solved approximately for the case of a time-independent trap.