In the theoretical description of recent experiments with dilute Bose gases confined in external potentials the Gross-Pitaevskii equation plays an important role. Its status as an approximation for the quantum mechanical many-body ground state problem has recently been rigorously clarified. A summary of this work is presented here.
Recent experimental breakthroughs in the treatment of dilute Bose gases have renewed interest in their quantum mechanical description, respectively in approximations to it. The ground state properties of dilute Bose gases confined in external potentials and interacting via repulsive short range forces are usually described by means of the Gross-Pitaevskii energy functional. In joint work with Elliott H. Lieb and Jakob Yngvason its status as an approximation for the quantum mechanical many-body ground state problem has recently been rigorously clarified. We present a summary of this work, for both the two-and three-dimensional case. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
The ground state of a gas of Bosons confined in an external trap potential and interacting via repulsive two-body forces has recently been shown to exhibit complete Bose-Einstein condensation in the dilute limit, yielding for the first time a rigorous proof of this phenomenon in a physically realistic setting. We give here an account of this work about the Gross-Pitaevskii limit where the particle number N goes to infinity with Na fixed, where a is the scattering length of the interparticle interaction, measured in units of the trap size.
Now that the low temperature properties of quantum-mechanical many-body systems (bosons) at low density, ρ, can be examined experimentally it is appropriate to revisit some of the formulas deduced by many authors 4-5 decades ago. For systems with repulsive (i.e. positive) interaction potentials the experimental low temperature state and the ground state are effectively synonymous -- and this fact is used in all modeling. In such cases, the leading term in the energy/particle is 2πℏ2aρ/m where a is the scattering length of the two-body potential. Owing to the delicate and peculiar nature of bosonic correlations (such as the strange N7/5 law for charged bosons), four decades of research failed to establish this plausible formula rigorously. The only previous lower bound for the energy was found by Dyson in 1957, but it was 14 times too small. The correct asymptotic formula has recently been obtained by us and this work will be presented. The reason behind the mathematical difficulties will be emphasized. A different formula, postulated as late as 1971 by Schick, holds in two-dimensions and this, too, will be shown to be correct. With the aid of the methodology developed to prove the lower bound for the homogeneous gas, two other problems have been successfully addressed. One is the proof by us that the Gross-Pitaevskii equation correctly describes the ground state in the `traps' actually used in the experiments. For this system it is also possible to prove complete Bose condensation, as we have shown. Another topic is a proof that Foldy's 1961 theory of a high density Bose gas of charged particles correctly describes its ground state energy.
We study the ground state of a system of Bose hard spheres trapped in an isotropic harmonic potential to investigate the effect of the interatomic correlations and the accuracy of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. We compare a local-density approximation, based on the energy functional derived from the low-density expansion of the energy of the uniform hard-sphere gas, and a correlated wave-function approach, which explicitly introduces the correlations induced by the potential. Both higher-order terms in the low-density expansion, beyond Gross-Pitaevskii, and explicit dynamical correlations have effects of the order of percent when the number of trapped particles becomes similar to that attained in recent experiments $(N\ensuremath{\sim}{10}^{7}).$
We consider the asymptotic behavior of a system of multi-component trapped bosons, when the total particle number [Formula: see text] becomes large. In the dilute regime, when the interaction potentials have the length scale of order [Formula: see text], we show that the leading order of the ground state energy is captured correctly by the Gross–Pitaevskii energy functional and that the many-body ground state fully condensates on the Gross–Pitaevskii minimizers. In the mean-field regime, when the interaction length scale is [Formula: see text], we are able to verify Bogoliubov’s approximation and obtain the second order expansion of the ground state energy. While such asymptotic results have several precursors in the literature on one-component condensates, the adaptation to the multi-component setting is non-trivial in various respects and the analysis will be presented in detail.