Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-quantum-matter-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2025/2/b/solution

Write , , and . At zero temperature all particles occupy . Expanding the bosonic annihilation operator in single-particle orbitals gives
This one-body density matrix is a Gaussian function of width ; it contains one wavefunction evaluated at , so its exponent is half that of the spatial number density . In particular,
the total number density at the trap centre, including condensed and noncondensed particles.
At positive temperature, with occupations of the trap energy eigenstates, the exact ideal-gas decomposition is
For , the sketch has a broad Bose-Einstein condensate component on scale and a narrower thermal peak near the origin. On approaching the broad component loses its weight , while the thermal part remains. Above there is no macroscopic broad Bose-Einstein condensate component; close to , low energy levels can still give a shoulder, so a single narrow Gaussian function is only a high-temperature description. At individual excited energy levels matter and the two-scale description need not apply.
For the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution applies. The leading off-diagonal one-body density matrix is
Here is the Gaussian function width defined by , and is the thermal de Broglie wavelength. The thermal cloud itself extends over the much larger spatial scale ; this is a correlation width, not the cloud radius.
Figure 1.
Ideal trapped-gas one-body correlations across condensation
. Curves for use the discrete oscillator spectrum and its thermal kernel, with the chemical potential chosen to fix . Each vertical axis shows ; the last panel enlarges the vertical scale. The dotted curve below is the condensate contribution. The value of used in the labels is the leading large- expression. Details.

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