Analyzing the basic dynamics of two bosons, interacting through a central force, we make three unequivocal conclusions: (i). Natural laws, demanding the ground state of a system to have least possible energy, forbid the existence of p = 0 condensate in a system of interacting bosons (SIB). (ii). The ground state of a SIB, with different number of particles having different momenta does not have least possible energy as it should be. (iii). All particles in the true ground state have identically equal energy, εo = h2/8md2, and equivalent momentum, qo = π/d. The real nature of Bose Einstein condensation (BEC) that exists in the superfluid state of a SIB is identified as the condensation of particles in a state of a pair of particles having equal and opposite momenta (q, -q) with center of mass momentum, K = 0 and q = π/d. We also discuss how experimental results pertaining to the existence of electron bubble and free rotation of molecules in helium droplets and clusters support the absence of p=0 condensate and how single particle basis (SPB), having an alliance with p=0 condensate, is inconsistent with certain physical realities of the system at low temperatures. These conclusions render strong support for our theory of superfluidity of a system like liquid 4He (Amer. J. Cond. Mat. Phys. 2, 32-52(2012).
Analyzing the basic dynamics of two bosons, interacting through a central force, we make three unequivocal conclusions: (i). Natural laws, demanding the ground state of a system to have least possible energy, forbid the existence of p = 0 condensate in a system of interacting bosons (SIB). (ii). The ground state of a SIB, with different number of particles having different momenta does not have least possible energy as it should be. (iii). All particles in the true ground state have identically equal energy, εo = h2/8md2, and equivalent momentum, qo = π/d. The real nature of Bose Einstein condensation (BEC) that exists in the superfluid state of a SIB is identified as the condensation of particles in a state of a pair of particles having equal and opposite momenta (q, -q) with center of mass momentum, K = 0 and q = π/d. We also discuss how experimental results pertaining to the existence of electron bubble and free rotation of molecules in helium droplets and clusters support the absence of p=0 condensate and how single particle basis (SPB), having an alliance with p=0 condensate, is inconsistent with certain physical realities of the system at low temperatures. These conclusions render strong support for our theory of superfluidity of a system like liquid 4He (Amer. J. Cond. Mat. Phys. 2, 32-52(2012).
Analyzing some of the basic aspects of the dynamics of two bosons (interacting through a central force) and their importance in determining the ground state of a system like liquid 4He, it is unequivocally concluded that our conventional belief in the existence p=0 condensate in the superfluid state of such systems [including the state of Bose Einstein condensate (BEC) of trapped dilute gases] is a myth.
Motivated by recent experiments on alkali gases in atom traps, a largely pedagogical account is given of the implications of the existence of a single-particle Bose-Einstein condensate for the phenomenon of superfluidity. The first conclusion is that, for alkalis in traps at the lowest temperatures, Bose-Einstein condensation coexists with superfluidity. Both experimental evidence and basic microscopic theory are reviewed in this context, with superfluidity in finite systems, quantized vortices and the threshold for breakdown of superfluidity all being referred to. The contrast between liquid 4He below the λ point and the alkali atom gases is then emphasized. Both exhibit superfluidity, but the manifestations of a Bose-Einstein condensate are quite different. For the atomic vapours, near to 100% of the atoms are condensed at the lowest temperatures, whereas from (i) neutron scattering and (ii) computer simulations in liquid 4He present evidence is that 7% is the condensate fraction. This leads finally into a brief discussion of superfluidity without a condensate, with specific reference to the two-dimensional Bose Coulomb gas. The main conclusion is that Bose-Einstein condensation and superfluidity are distinct consequences of deeper topological properties of the many-body wavefunction.
The paradoxes and disparities in the contemporary microscopic theory of superfluid helium (He–II) are discussed along with possible ways of resolving them by taking pair correlations of He4 atoms into consideration. It is shown that most paradoxes are associated with the commonly accepted initial assumption concerning the dominating role of single-particle Bose condensate (SPBC) in the quantum microstructure of the superfluid component ρs. The existence of intensive SPBC leads to a strong hybridization of the elementary excitation branches and to a common dispersion law for all boson branches, which is identified with the quasiparticle spectrum E(p) observed experimentally from slow neutron scattering in liquid helium. However, the stability of this spectrum during a transition through the λ-point and the large value of the gap in the vicinity of the “rotonic” minimum contradict both the Landau theoretical criterion of superfluidity and the small value of experimentally measured critical velocity. At the same time, a strong interaction between particles in the Bose liquid He4 strongly suppresses the SPBC which amounts to less than 1% of all He4 atoms and hence cannot be the main constituent of the superfluid component, unlike the case of a weakly nonideal Bose gas. Moreover, for a quite strong attraction between particles in a certain region of the momentum space, bound pairs of bosons can be formed in the superfluid Bose liquid, and a coherent pair condensate (CPC) analogous to the Cooper pair condensate in superconductors may appear. Such a strong CPC may completely suppress the weak SPBC. In this case, the one-particle spectrum ε(p) of elementary excitations does not hybridize with the collective (two-particle) spectrum and does not appear in the structure of the dynamic form factor S(p,ε), i.e., does not coincide with the spectrum measured from neutron scattering. The dispersion of one-particle spectrum is defined by the momentum dependence of the pair order parameter Ψ̃(p) and may have a minimum or a point of inflection at p≠0. This peculiarity in the one-particle spectrum of a Bose liquid with CPC but without SPBC vanishes together with Ψ̃(p) at the temperature Tc=Tλ of the phase transition from the superfluid to the normal state (unlike the rotonic minimum in the collective spectrum), while the corresponding critical velocity vc=min[ε(p)/p] vanishes at the λ-point in accordance with the Landau criterion and the experimental data. The assumption that the strong “Cooper-like” CPC is responsible for the quantum structure of the superfluid component ρs is confirmed indirectly by the successful application of the Justrow approximation (based on strong pair correlations) for describing the properties of liquid He4 and quantum liquid mixtures He3–4He on one hand, and by an anomalously large effective mass of He3 impurity atoms in He4, which is approximately equal to total mass of He3 and He4 atoms, thus pointing to the existence of helium atoms in superfluid liquid He–II. The value of the superfluid velocity circulation quantum in the Onsager–Feynman vortices in a Bose liquid with CPC but without SPBC is discussed as well as the critical velocities of superfluid He4 in ultrathin films and channels in which the creation and motion of quantum vortices are ruled out, and the quasiparticle spectrum undergoes dimensional quantization.
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 L2-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
In 1995 two different research groups observed for the first time the Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) in ultracold gases. When the confining magnetic trap was turned off the gas was left free to expand, and the velocity of the particles showed a clear peak: most of the particles were occupying the same single particle state, the one of lowest energy. The Bose-Einstein condensation had been predicted in 1925 by Einstein, written by inspiration of a work on the statistic of the photons by Bose (1924). In this work Bose described the behavior of an ensemble of photons, treating them as massless particles, with no number conservation associated. Einstein extended this approach to particles with a mass and with fixed number, creating what is now called the Bose-Einstein distribution. The particles that follow such a description are called ``bosons'', as opposed to the ``fermions'' of the Fermi-Dirac statistics. Einstein predicted that in a gas of bosons - under a critical temperature - a finite fraction of the total number of particles would have been in the ground state, and act as a single entity. This amusing theoretical discovery found its utility a few years later. In the late thirties, new techniques allowed to cool Helium-4 at few Kelvins above the absolute zero. The properties of the resulting liquid were a puzzlement to the scientific community: among others, it could flow without experiencing friction. The liquid was called a ``superfluid''. A first explanation was given by London in 1938, which linked the superfluid behavior to the presence of a BEC among the bosonic Helium particles. The fermions cannot condense by themselves. On the other hand, they can form bound pairs and act as bosons, as it happens in a metal at low temperature. Using this approach, in 1957 Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer created a successful model of superconductivity by describing a superconductor as a superfluid in a charged system. During the course of these years we explored the superfluid properties of Bosons and Fermions in different settings. The original contributions of the thesis are described starting from the third chapter, where we speak about the generation and stability of solitons in a periodic optical lattices, both fixed or in motion. In the fourth chapter we study the generation of giant vortices in cold fermions, by using a generalized hydrodynamical approach. In chapter 5 we study the effect of a quasiperiodic lattice and the glassy phase it produces on a gas of bosons. Finally, we study the interaction of normal matter and superfluids with gravitational waves. While this interaction is seen to be extremely small, we believe that the resulting formalism is interesting by itself.
One considers the superfluid (SF) state of a Bose liquid with a strong repulsion between bosons, in which at T=0, along with a weak single-particle Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), there exists an intensive pair coherent condensate (PCC), analogous to the Cooper condensate in a Fermi liquid with an attraction between the fermions. Such a PCC emerges in a system of bosons due to an oscillating sign-changing momentum dependence of the Fourier component of the pair interaction potential, which is characteristic of a certain family of repulsion potentials. In such cases, the Fourier component is negative in some domain of nonzero momentum transfer, which corresponds to an effective attraction. The collective effects of renormalization (``screening'') of the initial interaction lead to a suppression of the repulsion and an enhancement of the effective attraction. It is the ratio of the BEC density to the full density of the liquid n0/n≪1 that is used as a small parameter---unlike in the Bogolyubov theory for a quasi-ideal Bose gas, in which the small parameter is the ratio of the number of supracondensate excitations to the number of particles in an intensive BEC, (n−n0)/n0≪1. A closed system of nonlinear integral equations for the normal and anomalous self-energy parts is obtained, in the framework of a renormalized perturbation theory built on combined hydrodynamic and field variables. In the framework of the hard-spheres model, a spectrum of quasiparticles is obtained, which is in good accordance with the experimental spectrum of elementary excitations in superfluid 4He. The question of applicability of the Landau criterion in the absence of quantum vortices is discussed.