Momentum Distribution Of A Bose Condensed Trapped Gas

A peculiarity of trapped atomic gases is that Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) shows up not only in momentum space, where it is usually discussed in traditional textbooks, but also in coordinate space. This is the consequence of the inhomogeneity of these systems, which makes it possible to separate the condensate from the thermal component also in coordinate space. Actually, most of measurements in trapped gases have been so far limited to the study of density profiles and of the effects of BEC in coordinate space. The possibility of a direct measurement of the momentum distribution, as emerged from recent experiments based on two-photon Bragg scattering, is highly appealing. In fact, despite the inhomogeneity of the gas, BEC shows up more deeply in momentum than in coordinate space. In current experiments on harmonically-confined Bose gases, the sizes of the condensate R and of the thermal cloud R_T are in fact typically comparable.