Equilibrium Properties of Trapped Dipolar Gases at Finite Temperatures

TL;DR

This paper investigates the equilibrium behavior of trapped dipolar Bose and Fermi gases at finite temperatures, focusing on deformation effects and stability, with relevance to current experimental setups.

Contribution

It extends a variational formalism to Bose gases and analyzes the impact of dipolar interactions on thermal equilibrium and stability.

Findings

Deformation in momentum space can be observed at high temperatures.

System stability depends on temperature, trap aspect ratio, and dipole moment.

The formalism applies to current experimental conditions at JILA and Tokyo.

Abstract

We study the equilibrium properties of dipolar Bose and Fermi gases at finite temperatures. We recently developed a variational ansatz for the phase-space distribution function of a dipolar Fermi gas at finite temperatures. We extend the variational formalism to a Bose gas and discuss the effect of dipolar interactions with different statistics on the thermal equilibrium, with particular emphasis on the deformation in momentum space. We examine the stability of the system by varying the temperature, trap aspect ratio and the dipole moment. In addition, we discuss how deformation in both real and momentum space can be observed in the high-temperature regime, which is relevant for the current experiments at JILA [Ni et al. Science 322, 231 (2008)] and at University of Tokyo [Aikawa et al. New. J. Phys. 11, 055035 (2009)].