How do we justify taking the chemical potential, $\mu$ as $0$ when calculating the critical temperature of Bose-Einstein Condensates (BECs)?
I apologise as I do not how to use LaTeX, for if I did the elegance of mathematics would’ve allowed me to construct my question with ease...
I understand to calculate the total number of particles in a system comprised of non-relativistic bosons of mass m at thermal equilibrium at temperature $T$. One must simply some over the occupancies for each energy state, the occupancies is given by the bose-einstein distribution...
For some reason during the derivation setting chemical potential to zero within the bose-einstein distribution gives us the largest possible number of particles for a given temperature, can someone explain why this is true?
Edit: Also I know the within the bose-einstein distribution, the energy of the states must always be greater than the chemical potential, this confines the distribution to a range of $$ 0<\text{bose-einstein distribution}<+\infty$$ I can say that the lowest energy state (ground state) has an energy of 0 and thus chemical potential < 0, but if my ground state has an arbitrary non zero energy would the chemical potential = 0?