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We analyse occupation number fluctuations of an ideal Bose gas in a trap which is isolated from theenvironment with respect to particle exchange (canonical ensemble). We show that in contrast to the predictions of thegrand- canonical ensemble, the counting statistics of particles in the trap ground state changes from monotonously decreasing above the condensation temperature to single-peaked below that temperature. For the exactly solvable case of a harmonic oscillator trapping potential in one spatial dimension we extract a Landau-Ginzburg functional which - despite the non- interacting nature of the system - displays the characteristic behaviour of a weakly interacting Bose gas. We also compare our findings with the usual treatment which is base on the grand-canonical ensemble. We show that for an ideal Bose gas neither are the grand-canonical and canonical ensemble thermodynamically equivalent, nor the grand-canonical ensemble can be viewed as a small system in diffusive contact with a particle reservoir.
We discuss the exact particle number counting statistics of degenerate ideal Bose gases in the microcanonical, canonical, and grand-canonical ensemble, respectively, for various trapping potentials. We then invoke the Maxwell's Demon ensemble [P. Navez et al., Phys. Rev. Lett.(1997)] and show that for large total number of particles the root-mean-square fluctuation of the condensate occupation scales delta n0 proportional to [T/Tc]r Ns with scaling exponents r=3/2, s=1/2 for the 3D harmonic oscillator trapping potential, and r=1, s=2/3 for the 3D box. We derive an explicit expression for r and s in terms of spatial dimension D and spectral index sigma of the single- particle energy spectrum. Our predictions also apply to systems where Bose-Einstein condensation does not occur. We point out that the condensate fluctuations in the microcanonical and canonical ensemble respect the principle of thermodynamic equivalence.