Thermodynamics of an Ideal Bose Gas with a Finite Number of Particles Confined in a Three-Dimensional Quartic Trap

Within an exact canonical-ensemble treatment, we investigate the thermodynamics for a finite number of ideal bosons confined in a three-dimensional quartic trap. We calculate several physical quantities including the specific heat C N , chemical potential μ, condensate fraction 〈n 0〉/N, root-mean-square fluctuations δn 0 of the condensate population, and transition temperature T c . We discuss the particle-number dependence of T c through proposing three T c definitions, which are compared with ones derived in the grand canonical ensemble.