On the criterion for Bose-Einstein condensation for particles in traps

Abstract

We consider the criterion for Bose condensation for particles in a harmonic trap. For a fixed angular momentum, the lowest energy state for a cloud of bosons with attractive interactions is the ground state of the cloud with all the angular momentum in the center-of-mass motion, and the one-particle reduced density matrix generally does not have a single large eigenvalue, but a number of them, suggesting that the state is an example of a fragmented condensate (Wilkin, Gunn, and Smith, Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 2265 (1998)). We show that a convenient way to describe correlations in the system is by defining an internal one-particle reduced density matrix, in which the center-of-mass motion is eliminated, and that this has a single eigenvalue equal to the number of particles for the problem considered here. Our considerations indicate that care is necessary in formulating a criterion for Bose-Einstein condensation.