English

Ground state fluctuations in finite Fermi and Bose systems

Statistical Mechanics 2009-10-31 v2

Abstract

We consider a small and fixed number of fermions (bosons) in a trap. The ground state of the system is defined at T=0. For a given excitation energy, there are several ways of exciting the particles from this ground state. We formulate a method for calculating the number fluctuation in the ground state using microcanonical counting, and implement it for small systems of noninteracting fermions as well as bosons in harmonic confinement. This exact calculation for fluctuation, when compared with canonical ensemble averaging, gives considerably different results, specially for fermions. This difference is expected to persist at low excitation even when the fermion number in the trap is large.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0008114,
  title  = {Ground state fluctuations in finite Fermi and Bose systems},
  author = {Muoi Tran and M. V. N. Murthy and R. K. Bhaduri},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0008114},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

20 pages (including 1 appendix), 3 postscript figures. An error was found in one section of the paper. The corrected version is updated on Sep/05/2000