Fluctuations of the Particle Number in a Trapped Bose-Einstein Condensate

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Abstract
We develop a reliable procedure for calculating the microcanonical fluctuations of the ground state occupation number for harmonically trapped ideal Bose gases, and show that these fluctuations vanish uniformly when the temperature approaches zero. The key point is the precise determination of the number of microstates from the canonical partition sum, thus avoiding a failure of the usual saddle point method. We also demonstrate why the magnitude of the condensate fluctuations does not depend on the total particle number.