Bose-Einstein condensation in harmonic double wells

Abstract

We discuss Bose-Einstein condensation in harmonic traps where the confinement has undergone a splitting along one direction. We mostly consider the 3D potentials consisting of two cylindrical wells separated a distance 2a along the z-axis. For ideal gases, the thermodynamics of the confined bosons has been investigated performing exact numerical summations to describe the major details of the transition and comparing the results with the semiclassical density-of-states approximation. We find that for large particle number and increasing well separation, the condensation temperature evolves from the thermodynamic limit value T_c^{(0)}(N) to T_c^{(0)}(N/2). The effects of adding a repulsive interaction between atoms has been examined resorting to the Gross-Pitaevskii-Popov procedure and it is found that the shift of the condensation temperature exhibits different signs according to the separation between wells. In particular, for sufficiently large splitting, the trend opposes the well known results for harmonic traps, since the critical temperature appears to increase with growing repulsion strength.