Morphology of an Interacting Three-Dimensional Trapped Bose–Einstein Condensate from Many-Particle Variance Anisotropy

Abstract

The variance of the position operator is associated with how wide or narrow a wave-packet is, the momentum variance is similarly correlated with the size of a wave-packet in momentum space, and the angular-momentum variance quantifies to what extent a wave-packet is non-spherically symmetric. We examine an interacting three-dimensional trapped Bose–Einstein condensate at the limit of an infinite number of particles, and investigate its position, momentum, and angular-momentum anisotropies. Computing the variances of the three Cartesian components of the position, momentum, and angular-momentum operators we present simple scenarios where the anisotropy of a Bose–Einstein condensate is different at the many-body and mean-field levels of theory, despite having the same many-body and mean-field densities per particle. This suggests a way to classify correlations via the morphology of 100% condensed bosons in a three-dimensional trap at the limit of an infinite number of particles. Implications are briefly discussed.