Using a multiple-image reconstruction method applied to a harmonically trapped Bose gas, we determine the equation of state of uniform matter across the critical transition point, within the local density approximation. Our experimental results provide the canonical description of pressure as a function of the specific volume, emphasizing the dramatic deviations from the ideal Bose gas behavior caused by interactions. They also provide clear evidence for the non-monotonic behavior with temperature of the chemical potential, which is a consequence of superfluidity. The measured thermodynamic quantities are compared to mean-field predictions available for the interacting Bose gas. The limits of applicability of the local density approximation near the critical point are also discussed, focusing on the behavior of the isothermal compressibility.
We provide a detailed presentation of the functional renormalisation group (FRG) approach for weakly-interacting Bose-Bose mixtures, including a complete discussion on the RG equations. To test this approach, we examine thermodynamic properties of balanced three-dimensional Bose-Bose gases at zero and finite temperatures and find a good agreement with related works. We also study ground-state energies of repulsive Bose polarons by examining mixtures in the limit of infinite population imbalance. Finally, we discuss future applications of the FRG to novel problems in Bose-Bose mixtures and rela…
We present a comprehensive discussion of the ground-state properties of dilute $D$-dimensional Bose gas interacting with a few static impurities. Assuming the short-ranged character of the boson-impurity interaction, we calculate the energy of three- and two-dimensional Bose systems with one and two impurities immersed.
A weakly interacting Bose gas on a simple cubic lattice is considered. We prove the existence of the standard or zero-mode Bose condensation at sufficiently low temperature. This result is valid for sufficiently small interaction potential and small values of chemical potential. Our method exploits infrared bound for the suitable two-point Bogolyubov's inner product. We do not use the reflection positivity or some expansion methods.
Developing Bogoliubov theory of weakly interacting Bose gas in uncompacted three-dimension space, quantum fluctuation energy of one component dilute gas of Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) confined to two parallel plates investigated at zero-temperature in grand canonical ensemble (GCE) with Neumann boundary condition (BC). The Casimir force considered in comparison to the one with Robin BC, Dirichlet BC and periodic BC.
The critical temperature of Bose-Einstein condensation essentially depends on internal properties of the system as well as on the geometry of a trapping potential. The peculiarities of defining the phase transition temperature of Bose-Einstein condensation for different systems are reviewed, including homogenous Bose gas, trapped Bose atoms, and bosons in optical lattices. The method of self-similar approximants, convenient for calculating critical temperature, is briefly delineated.
We open a new discussion of generalized canonical partition function in standard statistical mechanics and apply it for the study of Bose-Einstein condensation. We discuss the possible cases for the generalized canonical partition function and arrives at a conclusion that the system of trapped bose gas will not be existing at absolute zero. We analyse the present study with an experimental result and point out the general difficulties in the analyses of experimental observations, which can possibly suppress the effect of generalized canonical partition function over standard canonical partitio…
We study the low-temperature thermodynamics of weakly-interacting uniform liquids in one-dimensional attractive Bose-Bose mixtures.~The Bogoliubov approach is used to simultaneously describe quantum and thermal fluctuations. First, we investigate in detail two different thermal mechanisms driving the liquid-to-gas transition, the dynamical instability and the evaporation, and we draw the phase diagram. Then, we compute the main thermodynamic quantities of the liquid, such as the chemical potential, the Tan's contact, the adiabatic sound velocity and the specific heat at constant volume. The st…
We study thermodynamic properties of weakly interacting Bose gases above the transition temperature of Bose-Einstein condensation in the framework of a thermodynamic perturbation theory. Cases of local and non-local interactions between particles are analyzed both analytically and numerically. We obtain and compare the temperature dependencies for the chemical potential, entropy, pressure, and specific heat to those of noninteracting gases. The results set reliable benchmarks for thermodynamic characteristics and their asymptotic behavior in dilute atomic and molecular Bose gases above the tra…
The Casimir effect in a dilute Bose gas confined between two planar walls is investigated in the canonical ensemble at zero temperature by means of Cornwall-Jackiw-Tomboulis effective action approach within the improved Hartree-Fock approximation. Our results show that: (i) the Casimir energy and the resulting Casimir force in the canonical ensemble remarkably differ from those in the grand canonical ensemble; (ii) when the distance between two planar walls increases, the Casimir energy and Casimir force decay in accordance with a half-integer power law in the canonical ensemble instead of an …
The flow of a uniform Bose gas at speeds greater than the Landau critical velocity, v_c, does not necessarily destroy superfluidity, but rather need only lead to a decrease of the superfluid mass density, ρ_s. Analyzing a weakly interacting Bose gas with a finite range interparticle interaction that leads to a Landau critical velocity at non-zero quasiparticle momentum, we explicitly construct the (non-uniform) condensate for fluid flow faster than v_c and calculate the accompanying decrease in ρ_s. We briefly comment on the relation of the physics to other problems in superfluids, e.g., solit…
We study the localization of collective pair excitations in weakly-interacting Bose superfluids in one-dimensional quasiperiodic lattices. The localization diagram is first determined numerically. For intermediate interaction and quasiperiodic amplitude we find a sharp localization transition, with extended low-energy states and localized high-energy states. We then develop an analytical treatment, which allows us to quantitatively map the localization transition into that of an effective multiharmonic quasiperiodic system.
We investigate multiparticle excitation effect on a collective density excitation as well as a single-particle excitation in a weakly interacting Bose--Einstein condensate (BEC). We find that although the weakly interacting BEC offers weak multiparticle excitation spectrum at low temperatures, this multiparticle excitation effect may not remain hidden, but emerges as bimodality in the density response function through the single-particle excitation. Identification of spectra in the BEC between the single-particle excitation and the density excitation is also assessed at nonzero temperatures, w…
We report measurements of particle number correlations and fluctuations of a photon Bose-Einstein condensate in a dye microcavity using a Hanbury Brown-Twiss experiment. The photon gas is coupled to a reservoir of molecular excitations, which serve both as heat bath and particle reservoir to realize grand-canonical conditions. For large reservoirs, we observe strong number fluctuations of order of the total particle number extending deep into the condensed phase. Our results demonstrate that Bose-Einstein condensation under grand-canonical ensemble conditions does not imply second-order cohere…
We present a stochastic matter field equation for an interacting many-body Bose system in equilibrium at ultracold finite temperature. Moreover, the proposed equation can be used for non-equilibrium dynamics on phenomenological grounds. This stochastic differential equation is based on a field phase space representation reflecting the underlying canonical density operator (fixed particle number N). Remarkably, it allows for an efficient numerical implementation. We apply our canonical c-field method to interference experiments with quasi-one dimensional Bose gases. Crucial features of these in…
We investigate the dimensionally induced phase transition from the normal to the Bose-Einstein-condensed phase for a weakly interacting Bose gas in an optical lattice. To this end we make use of the Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov-Popov theory, where we include numerically exact hopping energies and effective interaction strengths. At first we determine the critical chemical potential, where we find a much better agreement with recent experimental data than a pure Hartree-Fock treatment. This finding is in agreement with the dominant role of quantum fluctuations in lower dimensions, as they are explic…
We study the localization properties of weakly interacting Bose gas in a quasiperiodic potential commonly known as Aubry-André model. Effect of interaction on localization is investigated by computing the `superfluid fraction' and `inverse participation ratio'. For interacting Bosons the inverse participation ratio increases very slowly after the localization transition due to `multisite localization' of the wave function. We also study the localization in Aubry-André model using an alternative approach of classical dynamical map, where the localization is manifested by chaotic classical dynam…
We investigate theoretically the phase diagram of a spin-orbit coupled Bose gas in two-dimensional harmonic traps. We show that discrete Landau levels develop at strong spin-orbit coupling. For a weakly interacting gas, quantum states with skyrmion lattice patterns emerge spontaneously and preserve either parity symmetry or combined parity-time-reversal symmetry. These phases can be readily observed by experimentally engineering spin-orbit coupling and interatomic interactions for a cloud of $^{87}$Rb atoms in a highly oblate trap.
We calculate the spatially resolved optical emission spectrum of a weakly interacting Bose gas of excitons confined in a three dimensional potential trap due to interband transitions involving weak direct and phonon mediated exciton-photon interactions. Applying the local density approximation, we show that for a non-condensed system the spatio-spectral lineshape of the direct process reflects directly the shape of the potential. The existence of a Bose-Einstein condensate changes the spectrum in a characteristic way so that it directly reflects the constant chemical potential of the excitons …
The shift in condensation temperature caused by interactions is studied up to second order in the s-wave scattering length in a Bose-Einstein condensate trapped in a temperature-dependent three-dimensional generic potential. With no assumptions other than the mean-field approach and semiclassical approximations it is shown that the inclusion of a temperature-dependent trap improves the empirical values of the numerical parameters compared to those obtained in previous reports on the temperature shift.
We derive a stochastic process that describes the kinetics of a one-dimensional Bose gas in a regime where three body collisions are important. In this situation the system becomes non integrable offering the possibility to investigate dissipative phenomena more simply compared to higher dimensional gases. Unlike the quantum Boltzmann equation describing the average momentum distribution, the stochastic approach allows a description of higher-order correlation functions in a canonical ensemble. As will be shown, this ensemble differs drastically from the grand canonical one. We illustrate the …
An iterative scheme based on the kernel polynomial method is devised for the efficient computation of the one-body density matrix of weakly interacting Bose gases within Bogoliubov theory. This scheme is used to analyze the coherence properties of disordered bosons in one and two dimensions. In the one-dimensional geometry, we examine the quantum phase transition between superfluid and Bose glass at weak interactions, and we recover the scaling of the phase boundary that was characterized using a direct spectral approach by Fontanesi et al. [Phys. Rev. A 81, 053603 (2010)]. The kernel polynomi…
We discuss coherent atomic oscillations between two weakly coupled Bose-Einstein condensates that are energetically different. The weak link is notionally provided by a laser barrier in a (possibly asymmetric) multi-well trap or by Raman coupling between condensates in different hyperfine levels. The resultant boson Josephson junction dynamics is described by a double-well nonlinear Gross-Pitaevskii equation. On the basis of a new set of Jacobian elliptic function solutions, we describe the period of the oscillations as well as associated quantities and predict novel observable consequences of…
Using Landau's theory of two-fluid hydrodynamics we investigate the sound modes propagating in a uniform weakly-interacting superfluid Bose gas for values of temperature, up to the critical point. In order to evaluate the relevant thermodynamic functions needed to solve the hydrodynamic equations, including the temperature dependence of the superfluid density, we use Bogoliubov theory at low temperatures and the results of a perturbative approach based on Beliaev diagrammatic technique at higher temperatures. Special focus is given on the hybridization phenomenon between first and second sound…
The momentum distribution and dynamical structure factor in a weakly interacting Bose gas with a time-dependent periodic modulation in terms of the Bogoliubov treatment are investigated. The evolution equation related to the Bogoliubov weights happens to be a solvable Mathieu equation when the coupling strength is periodically modulated. An exact relation between the time derivatives of momentum distribution and dynamical structure factor is derived, which indicates that the single-particle property strongly related to the two-body property in the evolutions of Bose-Einstein condensates. It is…
We calculate the mean-field phase diagram of a zero-temperature, binary Bose mixture on a square optical lattice, where one species possesses a non-negligible dipole moment. Remarkably, this system exhibits supersolidity for anomalously weak dipolar interaction strengths, which are readily accessible with current experimental capabilities. The supersolid phases are robust, in that they occupy large regions in the parameter space. Further, we identify a first-order quantum phase transition between supersolid and superfluid phases. Our results demonstrate the rich features of the dipolar Bose mi…
In this paper, the condensate fraction and the critical atom number and its corresponding critical temperature of condensate ultracold boson atoms trapped in optical box traps, are investigated. The semiclassical approximation is employed in this study. The boxes traps are modeled by a general power-law potential. The deviation of the boxes traps from an ideal boxes traps are discussed. The out come results furnish useful quantitative theoretical results for the future BEC experiments in such traps
In this work we report preliminary results on the relaxational dynamics of one dimensional Bose gases, as described by the Lieb-Liniger model, upon release from a parabolic trap. We explore the effects of integrability and integrability breaking upon these dynamics by placing the gas post-release in an integrability breaking one-body cosine potential of variable amplitude. By studying the post-quench evolution of the conserved charges that would exist in the purely integrable limit, we begin to quantify the effects of the weak breaking of integrability on the long time thermalization of the ga…
Analytic expressions have been derived for the interaction potential between dipolar bright solitons and the binding energy of a two-soliton molecule. The properties of these localized structures are explored with a focus on their behavior in the weakly bound regime, with a small binding energy. Using the variational approach a coupled system of ordinary differential equations for the parameters of a soliton molecule is obtained for the description of their evolution. Predictions of the model are compared with numerical simulations of the governing nonlocal Gross-Pitaevskii equation and good q…
We present a novel quantum stochastic evolution equation for a matter field describing the canonical state of a weakly interacting ultracold Bose gas. In the ideal gas limit our approach is exact. This numerically very stable equation suppresses high-energy fluctuations exponentially, which enables us to describe condensed and thermal atoms within the same formalism. We present applications to ground state occupation and fluctuations, density profile of ground state and thermal cloud, and ground state number statistics. Our main aim are spatial coherence properties which we investigate through…
The critical properties of the phase transition from a normal gas to a BEC (superfluid) of a harmonically confined Bose gas are addressed with the knowledge of an equation of state of the underlying homogeneous Bose fluid. It is shown that while the presence of the confinement trap arrests the usual divergences of the isothermal compressibility and heat capacities, the critical behavior manifests itself now in the divergence of derivatives of the mentioned susceptibilities. This result is illustrated with a mean-field like model of an equation of state for the homogeneous particle density as a…
In the present paper, discussion of the canonical quantization of a weakly nonideal Bose gas at zero temperature within the framework of the Bogolyubov approach is continued. Contrary to the previous paper on this subject, here the two-body interaction potential is considered in the general form. It is shown that in such a case consideration of the first nonlinear correction also leads to the automatic particle number conservation without any additional assumptions or modification of the resulting effective Hamiltonian.
We investigate quantum gravity corrections due to the generalized uncertainty principle on three-dimensional weakly interacting Bose gases at both zero and finite temperatures using the time-dependent Hatree-Fock-Bogoliubov theory. We derive useful formulas for the depletion, the anomalous density and some thermodynamic quantities such as the chemical potential, the ground-state energy, the free energy, and the superfluid density. It is found that the presence of a minimal length leads to modify the fluctuations of the condensate and its thermodynamic properties in the weak and strong quantum …
We investigate the mechanical instability toward density collapse and the transition temperature of Bose-Einstein condensation in the weakly coupled boson-fermion many-body mixture of single-component boson and fermion gases, in the case of the repulsive boson-boson and attractive boson-fermion interactions; no fermion-fermion interaction is assumed due to the Pauli exclusion because of the diluteness of the mixture. The mechanical instability occurs in the part of bosonic gas in the case where the induced boson-boson attraction mediated by the fermion polarization overcomes the boson-boson re…
We study theoretically the dynamics of two weakly-coupled Bose-Josephson junctions, prepared with the same particle number $N$ and Josephson excitation number $ν$ but with different reduced one-particle purity $γ$. A novel entropy oscillation mode is predicted, in which one-particle coherence is transferred between the Bose-Hubbard dimers with no particle or energy transfer. We explain this purity oscillation using a semiclassical picture.
Using Landau's theory of two-fluid hydrodynamics, we investigate first and second sound propagating in a two-dimensional Bose gas. We study the temperature and interaction dependence of both sound modes and show that their behaviour exhibits a deep qualitative change as the gas evolves from the weakly interacting to the strongly interacting regime. Special emphasis is given to the jump of both sounds at the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition, caused by the discontinuity of the superfluid density. We find that the excitation of second sound through a density perturbation becomes weaker …
We report the direct observation of resistive flow through a weak link in a weakly interacting atomic Bose-Einstein condensate. Two weak links separate our ring-shaped superfluid atomtronic circuit into two distinct regions, a source and a drain. Motion of these weak links allows for creation of controlled flow between the source and the drain. At a critical value of the weak link velocity, we observe a transition from superfluid flow to superfluid plus resistive flow. Working in the hydrodynamic limit, we observe a conductivity that is 4 orders of magnitude larger than previously reported con…
Grand-canonical fluctuations of Bose-Einstein condensates of light are accessible to state-of-the-art experiments [J. Schmitt et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 030401 (2014).]. We phenomenologically describe these fluctuations by using the grand-canonical ensemble for a weakly interacting Bose gas at thermal equilibrium. For a two-dimensional harmonic trap, we use two models for which the canonical partition functions of the weakly interacting Bose gas are given by exact recurrence relations. We find that the grand-canonical condensate fluctuations for weakly interacting Bose gases vanish at zero …
We consider weakly interacting bosonic gases with local and non-local multi-body interactions. By using the Bogoliubov approximation, we first investigate contact interactions, studying the case in which the interparticle potential can be written as a sum of N-body δ-interactions, and then considering general contact potentials. Results for the quasi-particle spectrum and the stability are presented. We then examine non-local interactions, focusing on two different cases of 3-body non-local interactions. Our results are used for systems with 2- and 3-body δ-interactions and applied for realist…
Dealing with a few-fermion system in the canonical ensemble, rather than in the grand canonical ensemble, shows that a few-fermion system with odd number fermions behaves differently from a few-fermion system with even number fermions. An even-number-fermion system behaves like a Bose system rather than a Fermi system.
We review recent experiments on the Bose-Einstein condensation of photons in a dye-filled optical microresonator. The most well-known example of a photon gas, photons in blackbody radiation, does not show Bose-Einstein condensation. Instead of massively populating the cavity ground mode, photons vanish in the cavity walls when they are cooled down. The situation is different in an ultrashort optical cavity imprinting a low-frequency cutoff on the photon energy spectrum that is well above the thermal energy. The latter allows for a thermalization process in which both temperature and photon num…
Previously we numerically showed that thermalization can occur in an oscillating Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) with a disordered harmonic trap when healing length $ξ$ of the condensate is shorter than the correlation length $σ_{D}$ of the disorder [see, for example, the experiment reported in Phys. Rev. A \textbf{82}, 033603 (2010)]. In this work, we investigate the weakly interacting or Anderson localization regime $ξ>σ_{D}$ and show that the oscillating BEC can also exhibit a relaxation process from nonequilibrium to equilibrium. In such an isolated quantum system, energy and particle numbe…
The striped state of ultracold bosons with Rashba spin-orbit coupling in a homogeneous infinite system has, as we show, a constant particle flow, which in a finite-size system would accumulate particles at the boundaries; it is thus not a physical steady state of the system. We propose, as a variational ansatz, a condensate wave function for a weakly trapped system which behaves similarly to the striped state near the center, but does not have particle flow at the boundaries. This state has a line of unquantized coreless vortices. We show, by minimizing the total energy, that our modified stri…
A weakly interacting, spin-orbit coupled, two-component, ultracold Bose gas bound to a Bravais lattice is studied. Motivated by recent experimental advances in the field of synthetically spin-orbit coupled, ultracold, neutral atomic gases showing Bose-Einstein condensation, an analytic framework with which to describe such systems in the superfluid regime is presented. This is applied to a Rashba spin-orbit-coupled Bose gas in a two-dimensional optical lattice. The exotic nature of Bose-Einstein condensation in the presence of spin-orbit coupling is an interesting study by itself. Additionally…
We theoretically investigate sound modes in a weakly-interacting collisional Bose gas in $D$ dimensions. Using the Landau's two-fluid hydrodynamics and working within the Bogoliubov theory, we observe the hybridization of the first and second sound modes for $D\ge 2$. To model the recent measurements of the sound velocities in 2D, obtained in the weakly-interacting regime and around the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition temperature, we derive a refined calculation of the superfluid density, finding a fair agreement with the experiment. In the 1D case, for which experimental results ar…
In the present paper, quantization of a weakly nonideal Bose gas at zero temperature along the lines of the well-known Bogolyubov approach is performed. The analysis presented in this paper is based, in addition to the steps of the original Bogolyubov approach, on the use of nonoscillation modes (which are also solutions of the linearized Heisenberg equation) for recovering the canonical commutation relations in the linear approximation, as well as on the calculation of the first nonlinear correction to the solution of the linearized Heisenberg equation which satisfies the canonical commutatio…
Aiming for simplicity of explicit equations and at the same time controllable accuracy of the theory we present results for all thermodynamic quantities and correlation functions for the weakly interacting Bose gas at short-to-intermediate distances obtained within an improved version of Beliaev's diagrammatic technique. With a small symmetry breaking term Beliaev's diagrammatic technique becomes regular in the infrared limit. Up to higher-order terms (for which we present order-of-magnitude estimates), the partition function and entropy of the system formally correspond to those of a non-inte…
We study the one-dimensional Bose gas in spatially correlated disorder at zero temperature, using an extended density-phase Bogoliubov method. We analyze in particular the decay of the one-body density matrix and the behaviour of the Bogoliubov excitations across the phase boundary. We observe that the transition to the Bose glass phase is marked by a power-law divergence of the density of states at low energy. A measure of the localization length displays a power-law energy dependence in both regions, with the exponent equal to -1 at the boundary. We draw the phase diagram of the superfluid-i…
In this work, we study many-body excitations of Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) trapped in periodic one-dimensional optical lattices. In particular, we investigate the impact of quantum depletion onto the structure of the low-energy spectrum and contrast the findings to the mean-field predictions of the Bogoliubov-de Gennes (BdG) equations. Accurate results for the many-body excited states are obtained by applying a linear-response theory atop the MCTDHB (multiconfigurational time-dependent Hartree method for bosons) equations of motion, termed LR-MCTDHB. We demonstrate for condensates in a t…
We study the problem of disordered interacting bosons within grand-canonical thermodynamics and Bogoliubov theory. We compute the fractions of condensed and non-condensed particles and corrections to the compressibility and the speed of sound due to interaction and disorder. There are two small parameters, the disorder strength compared to the chemical potential and the dilute-gas parameter.
Nonuniversal effects due to leading effective-range corrections are computed for the ground-state energy of the weakly-coupled repulsive Bose gas in two spatial dimensions. Using an effective field theory of contact interactions, these corrections are computed first by considering fluctuations around the mean-field free energy of a system of interacting bosons. This result is then confirmed by an exact calculation in which the energy of a finite number of bosons interacting in a square with period boundary conditions is computed and the thermodynamic limit is explicitly taken.
We investigate the disorder effect on coherent fraction and the quantum phase transition of ultracold dilute Bose gases trapped in disordered optical lattices. Within the framework of Bogoliubov theory, an analytical expression for the particle density is derived and the dependence of coherent fraction on disorder strength as well as on lattice depth is discussed. In weak disorder regime, we find a decreased sensitivity of coherent fraction to disorder with the increase of on-site interaction strength. For strong disorder, the quantum phase boundary between superfluid phase and Bose glass phas…
We analyze the two-body momentum correlation function for a uniform weakly interacting one-dimensional Bose gas. We show that the strong positive correlation between opposite momenta, expected in a Bose-Einstein condensate with a true long-range order, almost vanishes in a phase-fluctuating quasicondensate where the long-range order is destroyed. Using the Luttinger liquid approach, we derive an analytic expression for the momentum correlation function in the quasicondensate regime, showing (i) the reduction and broadening of the opposite-momentum correlations (compared to the singular behavio…
We use entanglement to investigate the transition from vortex liquid phase to vortex lattice phase in weakly interacting rotating Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). Ground state entanglement spectrum is analyzed to distinguish these two different phases. For the torus geometry, the low-lying part of ground state entanglement spectrum, as well as the behavior of its lowest level change clearly when the transition occurs. For the sphere geometry, the disappearance of entanglement gap in the conformal limit (CL) can indicate this transition. We also show that the decrease of entanglement between par…
We uncover current-bias characteristics of superfluid-normal state junctions with weakly-interacting Bose gases. It is shown that in the presence of a chemical potential bias the characteristics can strongly be asymmetric for origin. The salient feature that is absent in the fermionic counterpart arises from a tunneling process associated with a condensate and a bosonic Andreev reflection process. It turns out that such processes are intrinsically nonlinear and therefore do not obey Ohm's law even at a low bias. In addition, the remaining processes are found to obey Ohm's law and become domina…
I show that the dynamics of the weakly interacting bose gas can be described by a modified time dependent Bogoliubov theory. The novelty of the approach is to include decoherence steps that gradually transform the entanglement entropy of the pure state into the von Neumann entropy of a statistical mixture. This approximation drastically reduces the entanglement that is needed in order to represent the system's state while becoming exponentially accurate in the mean field limit. I argue that this scheme can be extended to all quantum systems whose ground state can be well approximated by a vari…