  The coherence properties of degenerate Bose gases have usually been expressed
in terms of spatial correlation functions, neglecting the rich information
encoded in their temporal behavior. In this paper we show, using a Hamiltonian
classical-field formalism, that temporal correlations can be used to
characterize familiar properties of a finite-temperature degenerate Bose gas.
The temporal coherence of a Bose-Einstein condensate is limited only by the
slow diffusion of its phase, and thus the presence of a condensate is indicated
by a sharp feature in the temporal power spectrum of the field. We show that
the condensate mode can be obtained by averaging the field for a short time in
an appropriate phase-rotating frame, and that for a wide range of temperatures,
the condensate obtained in this approach agrees well with that defined by the
Penrose-Onsager criterion based on one-body (spatial) correlations. For time
periods long compared to the phase diffusion time, the field will average to
zero, as we would expect from the overall U(1) symmetry of the Hamiltonian. We
identify the emergence of the first moment on short time scales with the
concept of U(1) symmetry breaking that is central to traditional mean-field
theories of Bose condensation. We demonstrate that the short-time averaging
procedure constitutes a general analog of the 'anomalous' averaging operation
of symmetry-broken theories by calculating the anomalous thermal density of the
field, which we find to have form and temperature dependence consistent with
the results of mean-field theories.
