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Physical Review Letters

Fluctuations of the Particle Number in a Trapped Bose-Einstein Condensate

Siegfried Großmann, Martin Holthaus

Published Nov 10, 1997• 99 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We develop a reliable procedure for calculating the microcanonical fluctuations of the ground state occupation number for harmonically trapped ideal Bose gases, and show that these fluctuations vanish uniformly when the temperature approaches zero. The key point is the precise determination of the number of microstates from the canonical partition sum, thus avoiding a failure of the usual saddle point method. We also demonstrate why the magnitude of the condensate fluctuations does not depend on the total particle number.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.79.3557

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We develop a reliable procedure for calculating the microcanonical fluctuations of the ground state occupation number for harmonically trapped ideal Bose gases, and show that these fluctuations vanish uniformly when the temperature approaches zero. The key point is the precise determination of the number of microstates from the canonical partition sum, thus avoiding a failure of the usual saddle point method. We also demonstrate why the magnitude of the condensate fluctuations does not depend on the total particle number.
We study the ground state occupation number and its fluctuations for the Bose-Einstein condensate of trapped atoms using the microcanonical ensemble. The analytic formulas are obtained with the help of the saddle point method. We show that microcanonical fluctuations below the critical temperature tend to zero and scale with the number of particles as 1/N1/\sqrt{N}1/N​.
We question the validity of the grand canonical ensemble for the description of Bose-Einstein condensation of small ideal Bose gas samples in isolated harmonic traps. While the ground state fraction and the specific heat capacity can be well approximated with the help of the conventional grand canonical arguments, the calculation of the fluctuation of the number of particles contained in the condensate requires a microcanonical approach. Resorting to the theory of restricted partitions of integer numbers, we present analytical and numerical results for such fluctuations in one- and three-dimensional traps, and show that their magnitude is essentially independent of the total particle number.
We discuss the exact particle number counting statistics of degenerate ideal Bose gases in the microcanonical, canonical, and grand-canonical ensemble, respectively, for various trapping potentials. We then invoke the Maxwell's Demon ensemble [Navez et el., Phys. Rev. Lett. (1997)] and show that for large total number of particles the root-mean-square fluctuation of the condensate occupation scales n0 / [T=Tc] r N s with scaling exponents r = 3=2, s = 1=2 for the3D harmonic oscillator trapping potential, and r = 1,s= 2=3 for the 3D box. We derive an explicit expression for r and s in terms of spatial dimension D and spectral index sigma of the single-particle energy spectrum. Our predictions also apply to systems where Bose-Einstein condensation does not occur. We point out that the condensate fluctuations in the microcanonical and canonical ensemble respect the principle of thermodynamic equivalence.
Employing asymptotic formulas from the partition theory of numbers, we derive the microcanonical probability distribution of the ground state occupation number for a one-dimensional ideal Bose gas confined at low temperatures by a harmonic potential. We compare the grand canonical analysis to the microcanonical one, and show how the fluctuation catastrophe characteristic for the grand canonical ensemble is avoided by the proper microcanonical approach. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.
For a non-self-interacting Bose gas with a fixed, large number of particles confined to a trap, as the ground-state occupation becomes macroscopic, the condensate number fluctuations remain microscopic. However, this is the only significant aspect in which the grand canonical description differs from canonical or microcanonical in the thermodynamic limit. General arguments and estimates including some of the vanishingly small quantities are compared to explicit, fixed-number calculations for 102{10}^{2}102--106{10}^{6}106 particles. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.
The mean ground-state occupation number and condensate fluctuations of interacting and noninteracting Bose gases confined in a harmonic trap are considered by using a canonical ensemble approach. To obtain the mean ground-state occupation number and the condensate fluctuations, an analytical description for the probability distribution function of the condensate is provided directly starting from the analysis of the partition function of the system. For the ideal Bose gas, the probability distribution function is found to be a Gaussian one for the case of the harmonic trap. For the interacting Bose gas, using a unified approach the condensate fluctuations are calculated based on the lowest-order perturbation method and on Bogoliubov theory. It is found that the condensate fluctuations based on the lowest-order perturbation theory follow the law $〈{\ensuremath{\delta}}^{2}{N}_{0}〉\ensuremath{\sim}N,$ while the fluctuations based on Bogoliubov theory behave as N4/3.{N}^{4/3}.N4/3.