Abstract
Due to interatomic collisions, the ground state of a Bose-Einstein condensate of dilute atoms is not, as is commonly assumed, a coherent state. First recognizing this point, Lewenstein and You1 concluded that the condensate is actually an amplitude quadrature eigenstate. Including the effect of cubic and quartic fluctuation terms, Dunnmgham et al.2 obtained the more physical description of a bent, amplitude-squeezed state with strong number squeezing. Theirs is a symmetry-broken model, with the condensate assumed to be in thermal equilibrium with another much larger condensate providing a reference phase. However, the model includes no description of this coupling and leaves open the question of whether the ground state is a pure state or a mixture.
© 1998 Optical Society of America
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