Level Density of a Bose Gas and Extreme Value Statistics

Abstract

We establish a connection between the level density of a gas of non-interacting bosons and the theory of extreme value statistics. Depending on the exponent that characterizes the growth of the underlying single-particle spectrum, we show that at a given excitation energy the limiting distribution function for the number of excited particles follows the three universal distribution laws of extreme value statistics, namely Gumbel, Weibull and Fréchet. Implications of this result, as well as general properties of the level density at different energies, are discussed.