Bose-Einstein Condensation of Particles with Spin

Harley D. Scammell

Abdus Salam

The Bogoliubov theory of weakly interacting Bose gas is generalized to Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) of particles with arbitrary integer spin in a magnetic eld. On the basis of the Bogoliubov method of quasiaverages, an equation for the condensate wave function is obtained. The ground state properties, thermodynamic stability, and excitation spectra of such BEC are studied. The obtained results are compared to spin-1 Bose condensate.

Richard M. Friedberg, T. D. Lee, H. C. Ren

Masahito Ueda

Bose-Einstein (BE) condensation is a phenomenon in which a macroscopic number of particles occupy a single-particle state. Once a system undergoes BE condensation, a significant fraction of particles behave in lockstep, leading to a number of spectacular macroscopic quantum phenomena. This article delineates fundamental aspects of BE condensates with an emphasis on spin degrees of freedom. Here the gauge and spin degrees of freedom are coupled to produce a rich variety of spinor superfluidity and topological excitations.

C. G. Townsend, Wolfgang Ketterle, S. Stringari

In 1924 the Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose sent Einstein a paper in which he derived the Planck law for black-body radiation by treating the photons as a gas of identical particles. Einstein generalized Bose's theory to an ideal gas of identical atoms or molecules for which the number of particles is conserved and, in the same year, predicted that at sufficiently low temperatures the particles would become locked together in the lowest quantum state of the system. We now know that this phenomenon, called Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC), only happens for “bosons” – particles with a total spin that is an integer multiple of h, the Planck constant divided by 2π.

Ian Jauslin