Yang-Yang Thermodynamics on an Atom Chip

We investigate the behavior of a weakly interacting nearly one-dimensional trapped Bose gas at finite temperature. We perform in situ measurements of spatial density profiles and show that they are very well described by a model based on exact solutions obtained using the Yang-Yang thermodynamic formalism, in a regime where other, approximate theoretical approaches fail. We use Bose-gas focusing [ I. Shvarchuck et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 89 270404 (2002)] to probe the axial momentum distribution of the gas and find good agreement with the in situ results.