String Picture of Bose-Einstein Condensation

Abstract

A nonrelativistic Bose gas is represented as a grand-canonical ensemble of fluctuating closed spacetime strings of arbitrary shape and length. The loops are characterized by their string tension and the number of times they wind around the imaginary time axis. At the temperature where Bose-Einstein condensation sets in, the string tension, being determined by the chemical potential, vanishes, the system becomes critical, and the strings proliferate. A comparison with Feynman's description in terms of rings of cyclicly permuted bosons shows that the winding number of a loop corresponds to the number of particles contained in a ring.