Revision as of 12:42, 30 June 2022

Bose-Einstein condensation of the ideal gas

History

Bose-Einstein condensates originate with Bose cueing Einstein on the importance of statistics. There are 2 + 1 papers from Einstein on this topic:

1. Quantentheorie des einatomigen idealen Gases. A. Einstein in Königliche Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Sitzungsberichte 261-267 (1924).
2. Template:Einstein24b
3. Quantentheorie des einatomigen idealen Gases. A. Einstein in Sitzungsberichte der Preu\SSischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 1:3 (1925).

The first two papers are those usually recognized as providing the theory of BEC, in particular predicting accummulation of particles in the ground state. The third paper was trying to justify the results without recourse to what was actually the most important: the statistics. It appears that neither Einstein nor Bose were aware of the link to indistinguishability, with Einstein in particular looking at the "statistical dependence" of Bose as an assumption. For Ehrenfest and others, such results were outright qualified as "disgusting".