On the characterisation of fragmented Bose–Einstein condensation and its emergent effective evolution

Abstract

Fragmented Bose–Einstein condensates are large systems of identical bosons displaying multiple macroscopic occupations of one-body states, in a suitable sense. The quest for an effective dynamics of the fragmented condensate at the leading order in the number of particles, in analogy to the much more controlled scenario for complete condensation in one single state, is deceptive both because characterising fragmentation solely in terms of reduced density matrices is unsatisfactory and ambiguous, and because as soon as the time evolution starts the rank of the reduced marginals generically passes from finite to infinite, which is a signature of a transfer of occupations on infinitely many more one-body states. In this work we review these difficulties, we refine previous characterisations of fragmented condensates in terms of marginals, and we provide a quantitative rate of convergence to the leading effective dynamics in the double limit of infinitely many particles and infinite energy gap.