Thermodynamical Properties of a Rotating Ideal Bose Gas

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the thermodynamical properties of an ideal Bose gas in a rotating, anharmonic trap with a Mexican-hat shape, focusing on how rotation affects critical temperature, condensate fraction, and heat capacity.

Contribution

It provides a theoretical analysis of thermodynamical properties of a Bose gas in a rotating anharmonic trap, highlighting the effects of rotation frequency.

Findings

Critical temperature depends on rotation frequency.

Condensate fraction varies with trap shape and rotation.

Heat capacity shows characteristic changes with rotation.

Abstract

In a recent experiment, a Bose-Einstein condensate was trapped in an anharmonic potential which is well approximated by a harmonic and a quartic part. The condensate was set into such a fast rotation that the centrifugal force in the corotating frame overcompensates the harmonic part in the plane perpendicular to the rotation axis. Thus, the resulting trap potential became Mexican-hat shaped. We present an analysis for an ideal Bose gas which is confined in such an anharmonic rotating trap within a semiclassical approximation where we calculate the critical temperature, the condensate fraction, and the heat capacity. In particular, we examine in detail how these thermodynamical quantities depend on the rotation frequency.