Density excitations of a harmonically trapped ideal gas

Abstract

The dynamic structure factor of a harmonically trapped Bose gas has been calculated well above the Bose-Einstein condensation temperature by treating the gas cloud as a canonical ensemble of noninteracting classical particles. The static structure factor is found to vanish as wavenumber squared in the long-wavelength limit. We also incorporate a relaxation mechanism phenomenologically by including a stochastic friction force to study the dynamic structure factor. A significant temperature dependence of the density-fluctuation spectra is found. The Debye-Waller factor has been calculated for the trapped thermal cloud as function of wavenumber and of particle number. A substantial difference is found between clouds of small and large particle number.