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Local and global heat capacities of confined Bose gases: The impact of quantum migration

Altug Sisman* and Jonas Fransson†

  • *Contact author: altug.sisman@physics.uu.se
  • †Contact author: jonas.fransson@physics.uu.se
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Phys. Rev. E 112, 054131 – Published 18 November, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/s72k-4vmx

Abstract

The recently proposed macroscopic quantum phenomenon, Temperature-Induced Quantum Migration (TIQM), causes local heating and cooling and significantly affects the local heat capacity of a noninteracting confined Maxwell-Boltzmann gas. TIQM guarantees the non-negativity of local heat capacity at low temperatures, results in a substantial local heat-capacity overshoot, and provides a physical basis for global heat-capacity maxima and thermal confinement energy. We extend this framework here to Bose gases in three different rectangular domains, effectively providing three-dimensional (3D)/two-dimensional (2D)/one-dimensional (1D) confinement at high temperatures while transitioning to 2D/1D/zero-dimensional (0D) at low temperatures, thus inducing dimensional crossovers during temperature changes. We demonstrate that quantum degeneracy enhances the TIQM process, resulting in dimension-dependent effects on local and global heat capacities. For the 3D-2D crossover, TIQM leads to a giant excess local heat capacity and explains the mechanism for the enhancement of the global heat-capacity maximum, which surpasses the unconfined ideal Bose gas limit (1.93), reaching 1.97 at a finite density. Conversely, for the 2D-1D and 1D-0D crossovers, the excess local heat capacity diminishes with increasing quantum degeneracy (density), while it is TIQM alone that becomes responsible for excess global heat capacity. For the 1D-0D crossover, we find that only single-particle ergodic systems can have a global excess heat capacity; otherwise, the maximum behavior disappears completely. TIQM also provides a mechanism for the thermal confinement energy in Bose gases.

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Phys. Rev. E 112, 054131– Published 18 November, 2025
  • Received 14 June 2025
  • Accepted 23 October 2025
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by Bibsam.

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