Nature of the Condensate in Mass Transport Models

We study the phenomenon of real space condensation in the steady state of a class of one-dimensional mass transport models. We derive the criterion for the occurrence of a condensation transition and analyze the precise nature of the shape and the size of the condensate in the condensed phase. We find two distinct condensate regimes: one where the condensate is Gaussian distributed and the particle number fluctuations scale normally as L1/2 where L is the system size, and the second regime where the particle number fluctuations become anomalously large and the condensate peak is non-Gaussian. We interpret these results within the framework of sums of random variables.