Critical Temperature of a Trapped Bose Gas: Comparison of Theory and Experiment

2005/08/31 by Matthew J. Davis, P. B. Blakie, P. Blair Blakie · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Quantum, superfluid, helium dynamics #Strong Light-Matter Interactions #cond-mat.other

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.96.060404

published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 060404 (2006) · revtex4, four pages, three figures. v2: updated to published version. Several additions to figures, and better explanations in text in response to referee comments

openalex publication_date 2006/02/16 · arxiv created 2007/06/20 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30

Abstract

We apply the projected Gross-Pitaevskii equation (PGPE) formalism to the experimental problem of the shift in critical temperature Tc of a harmonically confined Bose gas as reported in Gerbier et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 030405 (2004). The PGPE method includes critical fluctuations and we find the results differ from various mean-field theories, and are in best agreement with experimental data. To unequivocally observe beyond mean-field effects, however, the experimental precision must either improve by an order of magnitude, or consider more strongly interacting systems. This is the first application of a classical field method to make quantitative comparison with experiment.

Citations

• Experimental study of the thermodynamics of an interacting trapped Bose-Einstein condensed gas
• Dynamics of thermal Bose fields in the classical limit
• Thermodynamics of an interacting trapped Bose-Einstein gas in the classical field approximation

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