Fragility of fragmentation in Bose-Einstein condensates

Abstract

A Bose-Einstein condensate produced by a Hamiltonian which is rotationally or translationally symmetric may be fragmented as a direct result of these symmetries. A corresponding mean-field unfragmented state, with an identical energy to leading order in the number of particles, can generally be constructed. As a consequence, vanishingly weak symmetry-breaking perturbations destabilize the fragmented state, which would thus be extremely difficult to realize experimentally and lead to an unfragmented condensate.