Questions around Bose-Einstein condensation
| When |
Jan 12, 2015
from 11:00 to 12:30 |
|---|---|
| Where | Centre Blaise Pascal |
| Attendees |
Nicolas Rougerie |
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The quest for Bose-Einstein condensation has been a major adventure of 20th century physics : 70 years separate the theoretical prediction (Einstein, 1925) from the experimental observation in 1995 (Nobel prize 2001, Cornell-Wiemann-Ketterle). The study of Bose-Einstein condensates has become one of the most active fields of contemporary physics. The object under consideration is the macroscopic matter wave constituted by many atoms of an ultra-cold gas occupying the same quantum state.
In this talk I will first review some aspects of cold atom physics relevant to the BEC phenomenon. The main emphasis will then be on one of the major theoretical questions posed by the experiments: how to take interactions into account ? Indeed, the very existence of BEC for interacting particles is a highly non trivial fact from a theoretical point of view.
I will present some recent mathematical advances allowing to shed some new light on this question. Interestingly, the relevant insight follows very much the original intuition of Bose and Einstein: the existence of Bose-Einstein condensation is a fundamental consequence of the statistics of bosonic particles. It thus holds in great generality, independently of details of the Hamiltonian under consideration.