Bose-Einstein condensates have been experimentally realized in cold Bose gases for the first time in 1995.This discovery has renewed interest in the theory of interacting Bose gases; however, the mathematical understanding of Bose-Einstein condensation is still incomplete.In this thesis we derive effective theories for the dynamical and spectral properties of Bose gases.Our theoretical description is based on scaling regimes where the number of particles N becomes large and the two-body interaction potential scales as N 3β-1 V (N β •), for a fixed β ∈ (0, 1].The case β = 1 is known as Gross-Pitaevskii regime.Our first result concerns the time evolution of Bose-Einstein condensates after the trapping potential is removed.In previous works, it was shown that the many-body dynamics can be approximated by a one-body nonlinear Schrödinger equation at the level of reduced density matrices.We provide a more precise approximation of the time evolution: in a second-quantized setting, we construct a unitary effective dynamics, which, in the limit of large N , approximates the fully evolved state in Fock space norm.Our result comes with an explicit bound on the rate of convergence.It is valid for β < 1.Our second result addresses the properties of the ground state wave function.It has been shown before that the ground state wave function exhibits condensation in the limit N → ∞, i.e. the one-particle density matrix associated to the ground state approaches a projection.We prove the optimal bound for the convergence rate, for a translation invariant system.To do this, we estimate uniformly in N the number of excited particles.This result is valid for β = 1.Our last result concerns the ground state energy and the excitation spectrum of the translation invariant system.We prove the validity of Bogoliubov theory; this allows us to compute the ground state energy and the low-lying excitation spectrum up to an error that vanishes for large N .This result holds for β < 1.This thesis is based on the articles [11], [9] and [10].i
Bose-Einstein condensates have been experimentally realized in cold Bose gases for the first time in 1995.This discovery has renewed interest in the theory of interacting Bose gases; however, the mathematical understanding of Bose-Einstein condensation is still incomplete.In this thesis we derive effective theories for the dynamical and spectral properties of Bose gases.Our theoretical description is based on scaling regimes where the number of particles N becomes large and the two-body interaction potential scales as N 3β-1 V (N β •), for a fixed β ∈ (0, 1].The case β = 1 is known as Gross-Pitaevskii regime.Our first result concerns the time evolution of Bose-Einstein condensates after the trapping potential is removed.In previous works, it was shown that the many-body dynamics can be approximated by a one-body nonlinear Schrödinger equation at the level of reduced density matrices.We provide a more precise approximation of the time evolution: in a second-quantized setting, we construct a unitary effective dynamics, which, in the limit of large N , approximates the fully evolved state in Fock space norm.Our result comes with an explicit bound on the rate of convergence.It is valid for β < 1.Our second result addresses the properties of the ground state wave function.It has been shown before that the ground state wave function exhibits condensation in the limit N → ∞, i.e. the one-particle density matrix associated to the ground state approaches a projection.We prove the optimal bound for the convergence rate, for a translation invariant system.To do this, we estimate uniformly in N the number of excited particles.This result is valid for β = 1.Our last result concerns the ground state energy and the excitation spectrum of the translation invariant system.We prove the validity of Bogoliubov theory; this allows us to compute the ground state energy and the low-lying excitation spectrum up to an error that vanishes for large N .This result holds for β < 1.This thesis is based on the articles [11], [9] and [10].i
This PhD thesis contains new results on the mathematical study of Bose-Einstein condensation and the main part of it is devoted to mixtures of condensates, i.e., systems composed of multiple bosonic species in interaction. We prove the validity of effective ground state theories for mixtures in the Gross-Pitaevskii and mean-field regime. We show that the ground state energy asymptotics, in the large-N limit, is captured by the minimum of a suitable one-body functional. Moreover, we prove that in the ground state all species exhibit Bose-Einstein condensation onto the minimizer of that functional. For mixtures in the mean-field regime, we provide a rigorous justification of Bogoliubov’s theory. This is done by computing the contribution to the ground state energy which is due to excited particles. We also prove a norm approximation for the ground state vector, in the Fock space norm. From the time-dependent viewpoint, we prove for the first time the validity of the effective equations that were previously known due to heuristic physical arguments, and that are confirmed by robust experimental evidence. Our results show that, for mixtures in the Gross-Pitaevskii and mean-field regime, the effective dynamics is governed by a system of non-linear Schrödinger equations, one for each species of the mixture. In the final part of the thesis we present additional results on problems and models related to the study on mixtures. We were able to derive the effective dynamics for spinor- and pseudo-spinor condensates. The equations that we obtain are precisely those of modern experiments with ultra-cold spin bosons. We also show that the mean-field model provide a time-dependent control of condensation that is very accurate for the typical duration times of experiments. A further result is the global well-posedness in the energy space of the singular Hartree equation. Last, we present new remarks on the adaptation of known techniques that one needs in order to prove the derivation of the magnetic Gross-Pitaevskii equation.
This thesis investigates the rigorous derivation of non-linear effective equations describing the time evolution of Bose-Einstein condensation from the N-particle linear Schrödinger equation, focusing on the one-particle reduced density matrix. The first chapter outlines the mathematical framework of many-body quantum mechanics, including the Fock space formalism. The second chapter studies the mean-field regime, proving that the condensed state converges to the non-linear Hartree equation by analyzing fluctuation dynamics to quantify the convergence rate. The third chapter addresses the physically realistic but mathematically challenging Gross-Pitaevskii regime, characterized by rare but strong interactions. Here, Bogoliubov transformations are used to capture crucial microscopic short-scale correlations, allowing for a quantitative derivation of the cubic non-linear Schrödinger equation. While the preceding chapters focus exclusively on repulsive interactions, the fourth chapter explores the focusing case with attractive potentials, which can lead to finite-time blow-up. Operating in an intermediate scaling regime, the effective focusing cubic non-linear Schrödinger equation is rigorously derived. Since the negative energy cannot bound many-body fluctuations, convergence is proven by approximating the dynamics via a quadratic Hamiltonian, in the spirit of Bogoliubov theory, and avoiding Grönwall estimates through the analysis of a coupled system of one-body linear equations for the one-particle density matrices.
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.
This thesis proves certain results concerning an important question in non-equilibrium quantum statistical mechanics which is the derivation of effective evolution equations approximating the dynamics of a system of large number of bosons initially at equilibrium (ground state at very low temperatures). The dynamics of such systems are governed by the time-dependent linear many-body Schroedinger equation from which it is typically difficult to extract useful information due to the number of particles being large. We will study quantitatively (i.e. with explicit bounds on the error) how a suitable one particle non-linear Schroedinger equation arises in the mean field limit as number of particles N → ∞ and how the appropriate corrections to the mean field will provide better approximations of the exact dynamics. In the first part of this thesis we consider the evolution of N bosons, where N is large, with two-body interactions of the form N³ᵝv(Nᵝ⋅), 0≤β≤1. The parameter β measures the strength and the range of interactions. We compare the exact evolution with an approximation which considers the evolution of a mean field coupled with an appropriate description of pair excitations, see [18,19] by Grillakis-Machedon-Margetis. We extend the results for 0 ≤ β < 1/3 in [19, 20] to the case of β < 1/2 and obtain an error bound of the form p(t)/Nᵅ, where α>0 and p(t) is a polynomial, which implies a specific rate of convergence as N → ∞. In the second part, utilizing estimates of the type discussed in the first part, we compare the exact evolution with the mean field approximation in the sense of marginals. We prove that the exact evolution is close to the approximate in trace norm for times of the order o(1)√N compared to log(o(1)N) as obtained in Chen-Lee-Schlein [6] for the Hartree evolution. Estimates of similar type are obtained for stronger interactions as well.
Starting from first-principle many-body quantum dynamics, we show that the dynamics of Bose-Einstein condensates can be approximated by the time-dependent nonlinear Gross-Pitaevskii equation, giving a bound on the rate of the convergence. Initial data are constructed on the bosonic Fock space applying an appropriate Bogoliubov transformation on a coherent state with expected number of particles N. The Bogoliubov transformation plays a crucial role; it produces the correct microscopic correlations among the particles. Our analysis shows that, on the level of the one-particle reduced density, the form of the initial data is preserved by the many-body evolution, up to a small error that vanishes as N−1/2 in the limit of large N.