Two-body anticorrelation in a harmonically trapped ideal Bose gas

Abstract

We predict the existence of a dip below unity in the second-order coherence function of a partially condensed ideal Bose gas in harmonic confinement, signaling the anticorrelation of density fluctuations in the sample. The dip in the second-order coherence function is revealed in a canonical-ensemble calculation, corresponding to a system with fixed total number of particles. In a grand-canonical ensemble description, this dip is obscured by the occupation-number fluctuation catastrophe of the ideal Bose gas. The anticorrelation is most pronounced in highly anisotropic trap geometries containing small particle numbers. We explain the fundamental physical mechanism which underlies this phenomenon, and its relevance to experiments on interacting Bose gases.

10 pages, 5 figures. v2: Minor changes and corrections to figures and text. To appear in PRA

References in corpus (5)

• Spatial quantum noise interferometry in expanding ultracold atom clouds
• Camparison of the Hanbury Brown-Twiss effect for bosons and fermions
• Observation of atom pairs in spontaneous four wave mixing of two colliding Bose-Einstein Condensates
• Spatial nonlocal pair correlations in a repulsive 1D Bose gas
• Many-body physics in the classical-field description of a degenerate Bose gas

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Two-body momentum correlations in a weakly interacting one-dimensional Bose gas
• Quantum Correlations of Ideal Bose and Fermi Gases in the Canonical Ensemble