Bosonic stimulation and the irreproducibility of condensate fragmentation

Abstract

It is pointed out that the quantum statistical phenomenon of Bosonic stimulation, inherent to Bose statistics and the associated Bose-Einstein correlation, can be effectively mapped on to the statistical problem of the Polya urn scheme. Thus, we predict an irreproducibility for the limiting non-degenerate values of the relative populations of two, or more equivalent but separated condensates resulting from the fragmentation of a given source condensate. Experiments are proposed that should verify this prediction $-$ using the dilute gas Bose-Einstein condensates, or a pulsed degenerate multi-mode laser, where one would look for the run-to-run (or the pulse-to-pulse) fluctuations of the relative populations.