Professor Roger A. Hegstrom
Department of Chemistry,
Wake Forest University
4 PM, Thursday, Jan. 29, 1998
Room 101, Olin Physical Laboratory
The recent observation of interference between a pair of Bose-Einstein condensates by Ketterle's group at MIT is interpreted by analyzing the many-particle wave function for the condensate pair, assuming a number eigenstate (Fock state) with a definite number of particles for each condensate. It is found that the most probable many-particle measurement outcomes break the configurational phase symmetry of the state. Analytical expressions for the particle distribution and current density for a single experimental run are derived and found to display interference. The spontaneous symmetry breaking, with appearance of a definite phase difference, is thus found to follow rather directly from the nature of the many-particle wavefunction and the fundamental postulates of quantum mechanics.