Bose-Einstein Condensation, Fluctuations and Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking
Abstract
The realisation of Bose-Einstein condensation under grand-canonical conditions has provided the experimental evidence for the simultaneous occurrence of macroscopic fluctuations and phase coherence of the condensate. The observation of these two features, against a consolidated tradition which wants the fluctuations to be pathological (grand-canonical catastrophe) and incompatible with spontaneous symmetry braking, calls for a comprehensive rethinking of the approach to the problem. In this paper we consider the uniform ideal gas in a box and we present an alternative conceptual framework. We show that the usually-employed Bogoliubov quasi-average construction fails to reproduce the broken-symmetry state. The observed features are accounted for by a different pattern of spontaneous symmetry breaking, characterised by condensation of fluctuations and long-range correlations of the order parameter.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2505.24228,
title = {Bose-Einstein Condensation, Fluctuations and Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking},
author = {A. Crisanti and A. Sarracino and M. Zannetti},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.24228},
year = {2026}
}
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6 pages