Effects of Interactions on the Critical Temperature of a Trapped Bose Gas

Abstract

We perform high-precision measurements of the condensation temperature of a harmonically-trapped atomic Bose gas with widely-tuneable interactions. For weak interactions we observe a negative shift of the critical temperature in excellent agreement with mean-field theory. However for sufficiently strong interactions we clearly observe an additional positive shift, characteristic of beyond-mean-field critical correlations. We also discuss non-equilibrium effects on the apparent critical temperature for both very weak and very strong interactions.

4 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Many-Body Physics with Ultracold Gases
• Observation of an Efimov spectrum in an atomic system
• 39-K Bose-Einstein condensate with tunable interactions
• Observation of deviations from ideal gas thermodynamics in a trapped Bose-Einstein condensed gas
• Can a Bose gas be saturated?
• Efficient Production of Large 39K Bose-Einstein Condensates