Abstract
Taking into account the possibility of particle-antiparticle pair production, we have investigated the onset of Bose-Einstein condensation in an ideal relativistic Bose gas confined to restricted geometries. Through an extensive use of the Poisson summation formula, we have carried out an explicit evaluation of the summations over states appearing in the problem, which enables us to make a rigorous analysis of the temperature dependence of the thermogeometric parameter y of the system in the case of a cubical enclosure under periodic boundary conditions. This, in turn, leads us to determine the growth of the condensate fraction ρ0ρ as a smooth function of temperature from TTc down to T=0 K. Finite-size corrections to the standard bulk results are obtained in explicit terms and are shown to be in complete agreement with the Fisher-Barber scaling theory for such effects. In the end, special geometries, such as narrow channels and thin films, are also examined.