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Physical Review Letters

Two-Step Condensation of the Ideal Bose Gas in Highly Anisotropic Traps

N. J. van Druten, Wolfgang Ketterle

Published Jul 28, 1997• 144 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The ideal Bose gas in a highly anisotropic harmonic potential is studied. It is found that Bose-Einstein condensation occurs in two distinct steps as the temperature is lowered. In the first step the specific heat shows a sharp feature, but the system still occupies many one-dimensional quantum states. In the second step, at a significantly lower temperature, the ground state becomes macroscopically occupied. It should be possible to verify these predictions using present-day atom traps. The two-step behavior can occur in a rather general class of anisotropic traps, including the box potential.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.79.549

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The ideal Bose gas in a highly anisotropic harmonic potential is studied. It is found that Bose-Einstein condensation occurs in two distinct steps as the temperature is lowered. In the first step the specific heat shows a sharp feature, but the system still occupies many one-dimensional quantum states. In the second step, at a significantly lower temperature, the ground state becomes macroscopically occupied. It should be possible to verify these predictions using present-day atom traps. The two-step behavior can occur in a rather general class of anisotropic traps, including the box potential.
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Multistep Bose-Einstein condensation of an ideal Bose gas in anisotropic harmonic atom traps is studied. In the presence of strong anisotropy realized by the different trap frequency in each direction, the finite size effect dictates a series of dimensional crossovers into lower-dimensional excitations. Two-step condensation and the dynamical reduction of the effective dimension can appear in three separate steps. When the multistep behaviour occurs, the occupation number of atoms excited in each dimension is shown to behave similarly as a function of the temperature. Multistep behaviours can be easily controlled by changing the degree of anisotropy.
We study the thermodynamic behavior of an ideal gas of bosons trapped in a three-dimensional anisotropic harmonic-oscillator potential. The condensate fraction as well as the specific heat is calculated using the Euler-Maclaurin approximation. For a finite number of particles there is no phase transition, but there is a well-defined temperature at which the condensation starts. We also consider condensation in lower dimensions, and, for one-dimensional systems, we discuss the dependence of the condensate fraction and heat capacity on the ensemble used.
Motivated by quantum statistical mechanics, we propose an accurate analytical solution to the problem of Bose–Einstein condensation (BEC) of ideal bosons in a two-dimensional anisotropic harmonic trap. The study reveals that the number of noncondensed bosons is characterized by an analytical function, which relates to a series expansion of q-digamma functions in mathematics. The q-digamma function is a function of temperature, boson number, and anisotropic parameter. The analytical solution describes fully the experimental results of the BEC of ideal bosons in a two-dimensional anisotropic harmonic trap. We derive the analytical expressions of the critical temperature and the condensate fraction in the thermodynamic limit. The first main conclusion is that for a fixed temperature and boson number, there is a critical anisotropic parameter, which is the precise onset of BEC in this harmonically trapped two-dimensional system. The second main conclusion is that the critical temperature in a two-dimensional anisotropic harmonic trap is larger than that in a two-dimensional isotropic harmonic trap.
We present an overview of our recent work describing the treatment of ultracold atomic Bose gases confined to two dimensions in a harmonic trap. We show how the gas goes through a number of regimes as the axially confining potential is increased and discuss the scattering properties of the gas in each of these regimes. We then use the formalism developed to investigate the phase-coherent Bose-Einstein condensate that is present in the trapped two-dimensional gas at temperatures that are low compared to the ideal gas critical temperature and to analyze the first-order coherence as a function of temperature. We identify the regime in which the gas loses its global phase coherence, although a macroscopic occupation of the ground state persists at a temperature well below the ideal gas critical temperature. We comment on the possible connection between this fluctuating regime and the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless phase.
We have observed the Bose-Einstein condensation of an atomic gas in the (quasi)uniform three-dimensional potential of an optical box trap. Condensation is seen in the bimodal momentum distribution and the anisotropic time-of-flight expansion of the condensate. The critical temperature agrees with the theoretical prediction for a uniform Bose gas. The momentum distribution of a noncondensed quantum-degenerate gas is also clearly distinct from the conventional case of a harmonically trapped sample and close to the expected distribution in a uniform system. We confirm the coherence of our condensate in a matter-wave interference experiment. Our experiments open many new possibilities for fundamental studies of many-body physics.