The Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) is a quantum phenomenon which was theorized in 1920s, but it was realized for the first time in the JILA Laboratory (University of Colorado, Boulder) by Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman only in 1995.
Since 1995, lots of experiments on BEC have been realized using different gases and various conditions. One can give a correct interpretation of the results of these works only by considering the role of interaction between particles on relevant
physical quantities, such as critical temperature and condensed fraction.
The purpose of our work is deducing the main thermodynamic properties of trapped and interacting Bose gases using the tools of Quantum Mechanics, avoiding the introduction of (which often recurs in litterature).
The first chapter shows a derivation of the famous Gross-Pitaevskii equation, starting from the many-bodies Dirac action and applying the principle of least action.
Moreover, two approximate solutions of this equation are discussed as well: the gaussian variational ansatz for weakly interacting particles, and the Thomas-Fermi approximation, for strongly interacting particles.
In chapter 2 we derive the Bogoliubov dispersion relation for excited states (or quasiparticle energy spectrum) with the tools of Hamiltonian Mechanics and semiclassical approximation. Furthermore, we discuss some approximations for this
formula (especially the Hartree-Fock spectrum for weakly interacting bosons) and we use the Bose-Einstein distribution to find the thermal cloud density.
In chapter 3 we use the previous results to calculate explicit expressions for critical temperature and condensed fraction (where possible) in four particular cases: ideal free and trapped Bose gas, interacting free and trapped Bose gas. We also
discuss the main results obtained by Giorgini, Pitaevskii and Stringari, who managed to explain accurately Cornell and Wieman's experimental plots.
Finally we conclude that traditional Quantum Mechanics is quite efficient to derive the main equations of BEC and that introducing second quantization is not essential.
Nevertheless, some issues remain unresolved in this context: for example the phenomenon of quantum depletion and the generalisation of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation at non-zero temperature.
The Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) is a quantum phenomenon which was theorized in 1920s, but it was realized for the first time in the JILA Laboratory (University of Colorado, Boulder) by Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman only in 1995.
Since 1995, lots of experiments on BEC have been realized using different gases and various conditions. One can give a correct interpretation of the results of these works only by considering the role of interaction between particles on relevant
physical quantities, such as critical temperature and condensed fraction.
The purpose of our work is deducing the main thermodynamic properties of trapped and interacting Bose gases using the tools of Quantum Mechanics, avoiding the introduction of (which often recurs in litterature).
The first chapter shows a derivation of the famous Gross-Pitaevskii equation, starting from the many-bodies Dirac action and applying the principle of least action.
Moreover, two approximate solutions of this equation are discussed as well: the gaussian variational ansatz for weakly interacting particles, and the Thomas-Fermi approximation, for strongly interacting particles.
In chapter 2 we derive the Bogoliubov dispersion relation for excited states (or quasiparticle energy spectrum) with the tools of Hamiltonian Mechanics and semiclassical approximation. Furthermore, we discuss some approximations for this
formula (especially the Hartree-Fock spectrum for weakly interacting bosons) and we use the Bose-Einstein distribution to find the thermal cloud density.
In chapter 3 we use the previous results to calculate explicit expressions for critical temperature and condensed fraction (where possible) in four particular cases: ideal free and trapped Bose gas, interacting free and trapped Bose gas. We also
discuss the main results obtained by Giorgini, Pitaevskii and Stringari, who managed to explain accurately Cornell and Wieman's experimental plots.
Finally we conclude that traditional Quantum Mechanics is quite efficient to derive the main equations of BEC and that introducing second quantization is not essential.
Nevertheless, some issues remain unresolved in this context: for example the phenomenon of quantum depletion and the generalisation of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation at non-zero temperature.
Since the dramatic discovery of Bose–Einstein condensation (BEC) in trapped atomic gases in 1995 (Anderson et al. , 1995), there has been an explosion of theoretical and experimental research on the properties of Bose-condensed dilute gases. The first phase of this research was discussed in the influential review article by Dalfovo et al. (1999) and in the proceedings of the 1998 Varenna Summer School on BEC (Inguscio et al. , 1999). More recently, this research has been well documented in two monographs, by Pethick and Smith (2008, second edition) and by Pitaevskii and Stringari (2003). Most of this research, both experimental and theoretical, has concentrated on the case of low temperatures (well below the BEC transition temperature, T BEC ), where one is effectively dealing with a pure Bose condensate. The total fraction of noncondensate atoms in such experiments can be as small as 10% of the total number of atoms and, equally importantly, this low-density cloud of thermally excited atoms is spread over a much larger spatial region compared with the high-density condensate, which is localized at the centre of the trapping potential. Thus most studies of Bose-condensed gases at low temperatures have concentrated entirely on the condensate degree of freedom and its response to various perturbations. This region is well described by the famous Gross–Pitaevskii (GP) equation of motion for the condensate order parameter Φ( r , t ). As shown by research since 1995, this pure condensate domain is very rich in physics. The main goal of the present book, in contrast, is to describe the dynamics of dilute trapped atomic gases at finite temperatures such that the noncondensate atoms also play an important role.
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
This thesis is devoted to the rigorous study of dilute Bose gases with two-body and three-body interactions at zero temperature in two and three dimensions. Bose gases are many-body quantum systems composed of bosons, which notably do not obey the Pauli exclusion principle. As a consequence, at extremely low temperatures, a macroscopic fraction of the particles can occupy the same one-body quantum state. This phenomenon, known as Bose–Einstein condensation, was predicted in the 1920s by Bose and Einstein for noninteracting Bose gases, and first realised experimentally by the groups of Cornell and Wieman, and Ketterle, earning them the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2001. However, proving the occurrence of Bose–Einstein condensation in general interacting bosonic systems remains a major open problem and constitutes a central theme in this thesis. Another important property of bosonic matter is that it is generally more unstable than fermionic matter. In particular, for systems interacting via the Coulomb force, the Pauli exclusion principle is essential for explaining the stability of the second kind, which states that the energy and volume scale linearly with the number of particles. Nonetheless, bosonic systems with attractive but less singular interactions can also be stable, and the rigorous proof of this fact forms a second focus of this thesis. In three dimensions, we consider predominantly repulsive interactions. Firstly, we prove a leading order upper bound on the thermodynamic ground state energy of Bose gases with hard-core three-body interactions, which matches an existing lower bound. In addition, we obtain a simpler proof for integrable potentials. Secondly, we derive the leading order of the thermodynamic ground state energy of Bose gases with combined two-body and three-body interactions. More specifically, we show that, at the leading order, the ground state energy is entirely characterised by the scattering length of the two-body potential and the scattering hypervolume of the three-body potential. Thirdly, we study the time evolution of Bose–Einstein condensates with three-body interactions in the so-called Gross–Pitaevskii regime. We show that Bose–Einstein condensation is preserved under many-body evolution and that the condensate wavefunction evolves according to the quintic Gross–Pitaevskii equation. In particular, we show that the effective coupling constant is universal in the sense that it depends only on the scattering hypervolume of the interaction potential. As a by-product of our proof, we derive a stability of the second kind result for Bose gases with attractive two-body interactions and repulsive three-body interactions. In two dimensions, we consider trapped Bose gases with mean-field-type interactions, including the purely attractive case. We prove the stability of the second kind of the system and the convergence of the ground state energy per particle to that of a non-linear Schrödinger energy functional. As a consequence of the stability of the second kind, we also obtain Bose–Einstein condensation for the many-body ground states.
In contrast with Chapter 2, in this chapter we include the dynamics of the thermal cloud. As noted in Chapter 1, we treat the noncondensate atoms using the simplest microscopic model approximation that captures the important physics. In particular, we consider only temperatures high enough ( T ≥ 0.4 T BEC ) that the noncondensate atoms can be described by a particle-like Hartree–Fock (HF) spectrum. To extend the analysis to very low temperatures is in principle straightforward (see Chapter 7). However, the details are more complicated since the excitations of the thermal cloud take on a collective aspect (i.e. a Bogoliubov-type quasiparticle spectrum must be used). In trapped Bose gases, the HF single-particle spectrum gives a good approximation down to much lower temperatures than in the case of uniform Bose gases, as first emphasized by Giorgini et al . (1997). In Section 3.1, we derive a generalized form of the Gross–Pitaevskii equation for the Bose order parameter Φ( r , t ) that is valid at finite temperatures. It involves terms that are coupled to the noncondensate component (the thermal cloud) and thus its solution in general requires one to know the equations of motion for the dynamics of the noncondensate atoms. In Section 3.2 we restrict ourselves to finite temperatures high enough that the noncondensate atoms can be described by a quantum kinetic equation for the single-particle distribution function f ( p, r , t ). A detailed microscopic derivation of this kind of kinetic equation is given in Chapters 6 and 7 using the Kadanoff–Baym Green's function formalism. A characteristic feature of a Bose-condensed gas is that the kinetic equation governing f ( p, r , t ) involves a collision integral C 12 [ f , Φ] describing collisions between condensate and noncondensate atoms.
This chapter introduces basic notions about Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs). One first studies ideal Bose gases, putting an emphasis on the role of the trapping geometry and of the dimensionality. One also introduces the correlation functions characterizing coherence. The second section deals with weakly-interacting BECs, which are described, in a mean-field approach, by the so-called Gross-Pitaevskii equation. This equation is derived and applied to a variety of experimentally relevant situations. The third section deals with beyond-mean-field effects that appear when the interactions are stronger, and introduces in particular the Bogolubov approximation. The last section is devoted to the study of BECs in double-well potentials, a situation inspired from condensed matter systems where beyond-mean-field effects can appear quite easily, and which remains simple enough to be studied theoretically in details.
In this paper, we mainly review recent results on mathematical theory andnumerical methods for Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC),based on the Gross-Pitaevskii equation (GPE). Starting from the simplest case with one-component BEC of the weakly interacting bosons, we study the reduction of GPE to lower dimensions, the ground states of BEC including the existence and uniqueness as well as nonexistence results, and the dynamics of GPE including dynamical laws, well-posedness of the Cauchy problem as well as the finite time blow-up. To compute the ground state, the gradient flow with discrete normalization (or imaginary time) method is reviewed and various full discretization methods are presented and compared. To simulate the dynamics, both finite difference methods and time splitting spectral methods are reviewed, and their error estimates are briefly outlined. When the GPE has symmetric properties, we show how to simplify the numerical methods. Then we compare two widely used scalings, i.e. physical scaling (commonly used) and semiclassical scaling, for BEC in strong repulsive interaction regime (Thomas-Fermi regime), and discuss semiclassical limits of the GPE. Extensions of these results for one-component BEC are thencarried out for rotating BEC by GPE with an angular momentum rotation, dipolar BEC by GPE with long range dipole-dipole interaction, and two-component BEC by coupled GPEs. Finally, as a perspective, we show briefly the mathematical models forspin-1 BEC, Bogoliubov excitation and BEC at finite temperature.