Canonical vs. Grand Canonical Ensemble for Bosonic Gases under Harmonic Confinement

TL;DR

This paper compares canonical and grand canonical ensembles for bosonic gases in harmonic traps, analyzing their differences, especially in the condensed phase, and providing explicit formulas and experimental comparisons.

Contribution

It offers an alternative derivation of ensemble relations and applies them to 2D harmonic traps, clarifying ensemble inequivalence and fluctuations in BEC.

Findings

Ensembles become equivalent in the thermodynamic limit.

Grand canonical fluctuations exhibit a catastrophe in the condensed phase.

Explicit formulas for energy and heat match experimental data.

Abstract

We analyze the general relation between canonical and grand canonical ensembles in the thermodynamic limit. We begin our discussion by deriving, with an alternative approach, some standard results first obtained by Kac and coworkers in the late 1970s. Then, motivated by the Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of trapped gases with a fixed number of atoms, which is well described by the canonical ensemble and by the recent groundbreaking experimental realization of BEC with photons in a dye-filled optical micro-cavity under genuine grand canonical conditions, we apply our formalism to a system of non-interacting Bose particles confined in a two-dimensional harmonic trap. We discuss in detail the mathematical origin of the inequivalence of ensembles observed in the condensed phase, giving place to the so-called grand canonical catastrophe of density fluctuations. We also provide explicit analytical expressions for the internal energy and specific heat and compare them with available experimental data. For these quantities, we show the equivalence of ensembles in the thermodynamic limit.