Quasiparticle kinetic equation in a trapped Bose gas at low temperatures

Abstract

Recently the authors used the Kadanoff-Baym non-equilibrium Green's function formalism to derive kinetic equation for the non-condensate atoms, in conjunction with a consistent generalization of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation for the Bose condensate wavefunction. This work was limited to high temperatures, where the excited atoms could be described by a Hartree-Fock particle-like spectrum. We present the generalization of this recent work to low temperatures, where the single-particle spectrum is now described by the Bogoliubov-Popov approximation. We derive a kinetic equation for the quasiparticle distribution function with collision integrals describing scattering between quasiparticles and the condensate atoms. From the general expression for the collision integral for the scattering between quasiparticle excitations, we find the quasiparticle distribution function corresponding to local equilibrium. This expression includes a quasiparticle chemical potential that controls the non-diffusive equilibrium between condensate atoms and the quasiparticle excitations. We also derive a generalized Gross-Pitaevskii equation for the condensate wavefunction that includes the damping effects due to collisions between atoms in the condensate and the thermally excited quasiparticles. For a uniform Bose gas, our kinetic equation for the thermally excited quasiparticles reduces to that found by Eckern as well as Kirkpatrick and Dorfman.