We consider a fixed number of noninteracting bosons in a harmonic trap. The determination of the exact microcanonical ground state number fluctuation is a difficult enterprise. There have been several theoretical attempts to solve this problem approximately, especially in 1D models where analytic results were found using some asymptotic formulae from number theory. Here, we obtain the exact number fluctuation curves, and show that these exact curves are substantially different from the results presented in literature for small particle number and finite temperature. Further, we show how these approximate microcanonical results may be derived using a canonical thermodynamics approach.
We consider a fixed number of noninteracting bosons in a harmonic trap. The determination of the exact microcanonical ground state number fluctuation is a difficult enterprise. There have been several theoretical attempts to solve this problem approximately, especially in 1D models where analytic results were found using some asymptotic formulae from number theory. Here, we obtain the exact number fluctuation curves, and show that these exact curves are substantially different from the results presented in literature for small particle number and finite temperature. Further, we show how these approximate microcanonical results may be derived using a canonical thermodynamics approach.
We consider a small and fixed number of fermions in a trap. The ground state of the system is defined at T=0. For a given excitation energy, there are several ways of exciting the particles from this ground state. We formulate a method for calculating the number fluctuation in the ground state using microcanonical counting, and implement it for noninteracting fermions in harmonic confinement. This exact calculation for fluctuation, when compared with canonical or grand canonical ensemble averaging, gives considerably different results. This difference is expected to persist at low excitation even when the fermion number in the trap is large. For comparison, the well-known bosonic results are also given.
This thesis encompasses a number of problems related to the number fluctuations from the ground state of ideal particles in different statistical ensembles. In the microcanonical ensemble most of these problems may be solved using number theory. Given an energy E, the well-known problem of finding the number of ways of distributing N bosons over the excited levels of a one-dimensional harmonic spectrum, for instance, is equivalent to the number of restricted partitions of E. As a result, the number fluctuation from the ground state in the microcanonical ensemble for this system may be found analytically. When the particles are fermions instead of bosons, however, it is difficult to calculate the exact ground state number fluctuation because the fermionic ground state consists of many levels. By breaking up the energy spectrum into particle and hole sectors, and mapping the problem onto the classic number partitioning theory, we formulate a method of calculating the particle number fluctuation from the ground state in the microcanonical ensemble for fermions. The same quantity is calculated for particles interacting via an inverse-square pairwise interaction in one dimension. In the canonical ensemble, an analytical formula for the ground state number fluctuation is obtained by using the mapping of this system onto a system of noninteracting particles obeying the Haldane-Wu exclusion statistics. In the microcanonical ensemble, however, the result can be obtained only for a limited set of values of the interacting strength parameter. Usually, for a discrete set of a mean-field single-article quantum spectrum and in the micro canonical ensemble, there are many combinations of exciting particles from the ground state. The spectrum given by the logarithms of the prime number sequence, however, is a counterexample to this rule. Here, as a consequence of the fundamental theorem of arithmetic, there is a one-to-one correspondence between the microstate and the macrostate, resulting in the vanishing of number fluctuation for all excitations. The use of the canonical or grand canonical ensembles, on the other hand, gives a substantial number fluctuation from the ground state. For a related spectrum, that given by the logarithms of an integer n, the microcanonical number fluctuation is non-zero but the application of the other ensembles is still not valid. These two spectra are examples of systems where canonical and grand canonical ensembles averagings yield answers different from the microcanonical result. Some models in physics may be used to obtain formulae known in the theory of number partition. For the same problem of N ideal bosons in a one-dimensional harmonic oscillator potential mentioned earlier, it is well known that the asymptotic (N --> ∞) density of states is identical to the Hardy-Ramanujan formula for the number of partitions of an integer n. The same statistical mechanics technique for the density of states of bosons in a power-law spectrum yields the partitioning formula for the number of partitions of n into a sum of 8th powers of a set of integers. By considering only the particle sector of the fermionic spectrum, a formula for the number of distinct partitions of n is obtained. For the s = 1 case and for finite N, the Erdos-Lehner formula for the restricted partitions, and a new formula for the distinct and restricted partitions are derived. As a diversion, we discuss the microcanonical entropy which may be uniquely defined in terms of the macrostate, or equivalently the many-body degeneracy of the state, at a given energy. The many-body degeneracy factor, however, is exceedingly difficult to calculate in general. It is thus desirable to find a different way to calculate the micro canonical entropy. It has been recently suggested that the microcanonical entropy may be accurately reproduced by including a logarithmic correction to the canonical entropy. This claim is readily tested using some of the models mentioned above, where the many-body degeneracy may be determined exactly. In addition, we also consider a system of N distinguishable particles in a d-dimensional harmonic energy spectrum. In this case the many-body degeneracy factor can be obtained analytically in a closed form.
Employing asymptotic formulas from the partition theory of numbers, we derive the microcanonical probability distribution of the ground state occupation number for a one-dimensional ideal Bose gas confined at low temperatures by a harmonic potential. We compare the grand canonical analysis to the microcanonical one, and show how the fluctuation catastrophe characteristic for the grand canonical ensemble is avoided by the proper microcanonical approach. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.
We question the validity of the grand canonical ensemble for the description of Bose-Einstein condensation of small ideal Bose gas samples in isolated harmonic traps. While the ground state fraction and the specific heat capacity can be well approximated with the help of the conventional grand canonical arguments, the calculation of the fluctuation of the number of particles contained in the condensate requires a microcanonical approach. Resorting to the theory of restricted partitions of integer numbers, we present analytical and numerical results for such fluctuations in one- and three-dimensional traps, and show that their magnitude is essentially independent of the total particle number.
For ideal Bose atoms in an isotropic harmonic trap, we consider thermodynamic variables obtained from microcanonical, canonical, and grand canonical ensembles, each with certain variables specified and other variables fluctuating. For the first two of these ensembles, we derive recursion relations that link partition functions for different dimensions. We discuss fluctuations in general, and obtain expressions for variances of the atom number N, the chemical potential \ensuremath{\mu}, and the temperature T for small, Gaussian fluctuations in the grand canonical ensemble. Then from our recursion relations and others given elsewhere, we obtain probability distributions for N, for ground-state occupation number n0, for \ensuremath{\mu}, and for T. Below the critical temperature, the shape of the distributions for N, n0, and \ensuremath{\mu} are definitely not Gaussian for the grand canonical ensemble. For given temperature and small N, we find that the chemical potential values pertaining to the three ensembles differ. We compare the specific-heat function CN(T) for the three ensembles and propose to use the minimum of dCN/dT to define the critical temperature to facilitate comparisons with similar configurations of interacting atoms.
We study fluctuations of the number of Bose condensed atoms in a weakly interacting homogeneous and trapped gases. For a homogeneous system we apply the particle-number-conserving formulation of the Bogoliubov theory and calculate the condensate fluctuations within the canonical and the microcanonical ensembles. We demonstrate that, at least in the low-temperature regime, predictions of the particle-number-conserving and traditional, nonconserving theory are identical, and lead to the anomalous scaling of fluctuations. Furthermore, the microcanonical fluctuations differ from the canonical ones by a quantity which scales normally in the number of particles, thus predictions of both ensembles are equivalent in the thermodynamic limit. We observe a similar behavior for a weakly interacting gas in a harmonic trap. This is in contrast to the trapped, ideal gas, where microcanonical and canonical fluctuations are different in the thermodynamic limit.