Variational Theories with Many-Body Correlations for Dilute Bose–Einstein Condensates [an abstract of dissertation and a summary of dissertation review]

航 河野

和政 筒井

正仁 上田, Masahito Ueda

保彦 津江

A. C. Wilson, Callum R. McKenzie

An introductory level review of experimental techniques essential for producing and probing Bose condensates formed with dilute alkali vapours is presented. This discussion includes a summary of evaporative cooling techniques, condensate imaging schemes, and a review of current BEC technology.

Zen Revista, 10 PHYSICS

Quantum statistical mechanics is the arithmetic of indistinguishable particles: bosons that pile into a single state and fermions that refuse to share---statistics whose consequences range from the Bose-Einstein condensate, a macroscopic quantum state, to the Fermi gas's pressure that holds white dwarfs against collapse. This article presents a narrative review of the primary literature of that statistics, from Bose's Planck's law and the light quantum hypothesis and Einstein's quantum theory of the monatomic ideal gas with its 1925 second paper predicting the condensation, through Fermi's quantization of the monatomic perfect gas and Dirac's theory of quantum mechanics, which independently founded the Fermi-Dirac statistics, London's identification of the lambda-phenomenon of liquid helium with the Bose-Einstein degeneracy, the experimental vindication of Anderson, Ensher, Matthews, Wieman, and Cornell's observation of Bose-Einstein condensation in a dilute atomic vapor and Davis and colleagues' sodium condensate, DeMarco and Jin's onset of Fermi degeneracy in a trapped atomic gas, and the syntheses of Leggett's fundamental concepts, Pitaevskii and Stringari's Bose-Einstein condensation, and Bloch, Dalibard, and Zwerger's many-body physics with ultracold gases. The synthesis is organized around three themes: the statistics' invention, in which indistinguishability's consequences were computed before any condensate existed; the condensate's realization, in which the dilute atomic vapors delivered Einstein's sixty-year-old prediction; and the many-body era, in which the ultracold gases became quantum simulators of matter's collective behavior. It is concluded that quantum statistics is the theory whose consequences were verified in reverse---predicted abstractly, found in liquid helium, created in atomic vapors---and that its bosons and fermions remain the universe's two grammars.