Quantum field theory and Bose Einstein condensation

We study the phenomenon of Bose-Einstein condensation in cosmological and laboratory situations. To do this we examine the extreme temperature limits of a self-interacting O(2)-invariant scalar field theory with a non-zero charge density. The transition point has been well known for a long time in the case of an interactionless theory. However, due to a combination of technical problems imposed by having interactions and finite density, the transition in the interacting theory is not well understood. Here, in order to probe the Bose-Einstein condensation transition we perform a dimensional reduction of the 4D O(2)-invariant theory to give an effective theory in 3D. After dimensional reduction we use the 3D effective theory to calculate the two-loop effective potential which is used to examine the phase structure. This is a perturbative calculation and is still inappropriate for looking at the critical temperature. To find the critical temperature we use the non-perturbative linear delta expansion on the effective 3D theory. Tins is done in both the high temperature limit appropriate to cosmological applications and the low temperature limit appropriate to laboratory experiments with atomic gases. We study the Bose-Einstein condensation transition out of equilibrium. After a sudden quench which sends the system into the critical region, we look at how the condensate originates and grows. We study the equations of motion obtained from the one-loop effective action. It is found that the magnitude of the field expectation value grows at a slower rate at higher charge densities but that charge flows into the ground state at a faster rate at higher charge densities. In order to perform most of the analytic calculations, we show how dimensional regularization and Mellin summation can be elegantly combined to give an economical method for calculating high temperature Feynman diagrams. (author)