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  • Textbook
  • © 2005

The Mathematics of the Bose Gas and its Condensation

Birkhäuser
  • The only available summary of its kind
  • Written with attention to pedagogical detail
  • No book that covers these topics on this mathematical level
  • Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Part of the book series: Oberwolfach Seminars (OWS, volume 34)

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About this book

The mathematical study of the Bose gas goes back to the ?rst quarter of the twentieth century, with the invention of quantum mechanics. The name refers to the Indian physicist S.N. Bose who realized in 1924 that the statistics governing photons(essentiallyinventedbyMaxPlanckin1900)isdetermined(usingmodern terminology) by restricting the physical Hilbert space to be the symmetric tensor product of single photon states. Shortly afterwards, Einstein applied this idea to massive particles, such as a gas of atoms, and discovered the phenomenon that we now call Bose-Einstein condensation. At that time this was viewed as a mathematical curiosity with little experimental interest, however. The peculiar properties of liquid Helium (?rst lique?ed by Kammerlingh Onnes in 1908) were eventually viewed as an experimental realization of Bose- Einstein statistics applied to Helium atoms. The unresolved mathematical pr- lem was that the atoms in liquid Helium are far from the kind of non-interacting particles envisaged in Einstein’s theory, and the question that needed to be - solved was whether Bose-Einstein condensation really takes place in a strongly interacting system — or even in a weakly interacting system. That question is still with us, three quarters of a century later! The ?rst systematic and semi-rigorous mathematical treatment of the pr- lem was due to Bogoliubov in 1947, but that theory, while intuitively appealing and undoubtedly correct in many aspects, has major gaps and some ?aws. The 1950’s and 1960’s brought a renewed ?urry of interest in the question, but while theoreticalintuitionbene?tedhugelyfromthisactivitythemathematicalstructure did not signi?cantly improve.

Reviews

"The presentation provides significant insight into a large part of the current issues of interest in the physics of Bose systems and especially into the "kitchen" of several relevant mathematical techniques. As such, it is highly recommended to both advanced researchers and students preparing to work in this field."

(Mathematical Reviews)

Authors and Affiliations

  • Departments of Mathematics and Physics, Princeton University, Jadwin Hall, Princeton, USA

    Elliott H. Lieb

  • Department of Mathematics, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Jan Philip Solovej

  • Department of Physics, Princeton University, Jadwin Hall, Princeton, USA

    Robert Seiringer

  • Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität Wien, Wien, Austria

    Jakob Yngvason

Bibliographic Information

Buy it now

Buying options

eBook USD 44.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book USD 59.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access