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
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106 particles. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.
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 analyse occupation number fluctuations of an ideal Bose gas in a trap which is isolated from the environment with respect to particle exchange (canonical ensemble). We show that in contrast to the predictions of the grandcanonical ensemble, the counting statistics of particles in the trap ground state changes from monotonously decreasing above the condensation temperature to single-peaked below that temperature. For the exactly solvable case of a harmonic oscillator trapping potential in one spatial dimension we extract a Landau–Ginzburg functional which–despite the non-interacting nature of the system–displays the characteristic behaviour of a weakly interacting Bose gas. We also compare our findings with the usual treatment which is based on the grand-canonical ensemble. We show that for an ideal Bose gas neither the grand-canonical and canonical ensemble thermodynamically equivalent, nor the grand-canonical ensemble can be viewed as a small system in diffusive contact with a particle reservoir.
For ideal Bose atoms in an isotropic harmonic trap, we consider thermodynamic variables obtained from microcanonical, canonical, and grand canonical ensembles, each with certain variables specified and other variables fluctuating. For the first two of these ensembles, we derive recursion relations that link partition functions for different dimensions. We discuss fluctuations in general, and obtain expressions for variances of the atom number N, the chemical potential \ensuremath{\mu}, and the temperature T for small, Gaussian fluctuations in the grand canonical ensemble. Then from our recursion relations and others given elsewhere, we obtain probability distributions for N, for ground-state occupation number
n0, for \ensuremath{\mu}, and for T. Below the critical temperature, the shape of the distributions for N,
n0, and \ensuremath{\mu} are definitely not Gaussian for the grand canonical ensemble. For given temperature and small N, we find that the chemical potential values pertaining to the three ensembles differ. We compare the specific-heat function
CN(T) for the three ensembles and propose to use the minimum of
dCN/dT to define the critical temperature to facilitate comparisons with similar configurations of interacting atoms.
Abstract The grand canonical catastrophe—characterized by order-unity relative fluctuations of the ground-state occupation in the grand canonical ensemble (GCE) at low temperatures—is a hallmark of ensemble inequivalence in ideal Bose gases and has been observed in photon Bose–Einstein condensates. In this work, we investigate an alternative class of observables defined via conditional ensemble averages , namely ⟨ n 0 / N ⟩ and ⟨ δ n 0 2 / N 2 ⟩ , where the average excludes the empty-system sector ( N = 0 ). Using the exactly solvable model of an ideal Bose gas in a one-dimensional harmonic trap, we show that these conditional averages reproduce microcanonical predictions even for modest particle numbers ( N ∼ 10 ) and exhibit vanishing relative fluctuations as temperature approaches zero. We stress that this does not contradict the standard GCE result ⟨ δ n 0 2 ⟩ → ⟨ N ⟩ 2 , which remains thermodynamically valid for open systems. Instead, our framework provides a natural description for experimental scenarios involving post-selection or implicit conditioning on non-empty realizations—common in few-body quantum gas experiments. Thus, the absence of large fluctuations in these conditional averages reflects a change in the observable, not a failure of ensemble theory.