Equilibrium Properties of Trapped Dipolar Gases at Finite Temperatures

We study the equilibrium properties of dipolar Bose and Fermi gases at finite temperatures. We recently developed a variational ansatz for the phase-space distribution function of a dipolar Fermi gas at finite temperatures. We extend the variational formalism to a Bose gas and discuss the effect of dipolar interactions with different statistics on the thermal equilibrium, with particular emphasis on the deformation in momentum space. We examine the stability of the system by varying the temperature, trap aspect ratio and the dipole moment. In addition, we discuss how deformation in both real and momentum space can be observed in the high-temperature regime, which is relevant for the current experiments at JILA [Ni et al. Science 322, 231 (2008)] and at University of Tokyo [Aikawa et al. New. J. Phys. 11, 055035 (2009)].