Bose-Einstein condensation in an optical lattice

TL;DR

This paper derives an analytic expression for the critical temperature of Bose-Einstein condensation in an optical lattice, accounting for various effects, and validates it with numerical methods across different parameters.

Contribution

It presents a new analytic formula for the critical temperature of bosons in optical lattices, including corrections and a simple numerical prediction method.

Findings

Critical temperature can be tuned by adjusting trap frequency.

Analytic expression matches numerical results well.

Effective mass and finite size effects significantly influence condensation.

Abstract

In this paper we develop an analytic expression for the critical temperature for a gas of ideal bosons in a combined harmonic lattice potential, relevant to current experiments using optical lattices. We give corrections to the critical temperature arising from effective mass modifications of the low energy spectrum, finite size effects and excited band states. We compute the critical temperature using numerical methods and compare to our analytic result. We study condensation in an optical lattice over a wide parameter regime and demonstrate that the critical temperature can be increased or reduced relative to the purely harmonic case by adjusting the harmonic trap frequency. We show that a simple numerical procedure based on a piecewise analytic density of states provides an accurate prediction for the critical temperature.