We study the ground-state properties of a system of
N harmonically trapped bosons of mass
m interacting with two-body contact interactions, from small to large scattering lengths. This is accomplished in a hyperspherical coordinate system that is flexible enough to describe both the overall scale of the gas and two-body correlations. By adapting the lowest-order constrained-variational method, we are able to semiquantitatively attain Bose-Einstein condensate ground-state energies even for gases with infinite scattering length. In the large-particle-number limit, our method provides analytical estimates for the energy per particle ${E}_{0}/N\ensuremath{\approx}2.5{N}^{1/3}\ensuremath{\hbar}\ensuremath{\omega}$ and two-body contact ${C}_{2}/N\ensuremath{\approx}16{N}^{1/6}\sqrt{m\ensuremath{\omega}/\ensuremath{\hbar}}$ for a Bose gas on resonance, where $\ensuremath{\omega}$ is the trap frequency.
Excitation of an atomic-gas Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) in the zeroth-order ground-state channel is studied with the hyperspherical adiabatic method of Bohn et al. [Bohn et al., Phys. Rev. A 58, 584 (1998)] suitably generalized to accommodate the anisotropic trapping potential. The method exploits the system's size as an adiabatic parameter so that the explicit size dependence is immediately conducive to the virial theorem. The oscillation frequencies associated with the monopole (breathing) and quadrupole modes thus emerge naturally and converge to the well-known Thomas-Fermi limits. Analysis of the single-particle density and the projected excitation wave function shows that the excitation in the single hyperspherical ground-state channel merely represents a progressive increase in occupancy of the first excited single-particle state. The work paves the way for applying the adiabatic picture to other BEC phenomena.
In the present chapter we consider the structure of the Bose–Einstein condensed state in the presence of interactions. Our discussion is based on the Gross–Pitaevskii equation, which describes the zero-temperature properties of the non-uniform Bose gas when the scattering length a is much less than the mean interparticle spacing. We shall first derive the Gross–Pitaevskii equation at zero temperature by treating the interaction between particles in a mean-field approximation (Sec. 6.1). Following that, in Sec. 6.2 we discuss the ground state of atomic clouds in a harmonic-oscillator potential. We compare results obtained by variational methods with those derived in the Thomas-Fermi approximation, in which the kinetic energy operator is neglected in the Gross–Pitaevskii equation. The Thomas–Fermi approximation fails near the surface of a cloud, and in Sec. 6.3 we calculate the surface structure using the Gross–Pitaevskii equation. Finally, in Sec. 6.4 we determine how the condensate wave function ‘heals’ when subjected to a localized disturbance. The Gross–Pitaevskii equation In the previous chapter we have shown that the effective interaction between two particles at low energies is a constant in the momentum representation, U 0 = 4πħ 2 a / m . In coordinate space this corresponds to a contact interaction U 0 δ( r – r ′), where r and r ′ are the positions of the two particles. To investigate the energy of man y-body states we adopt a Hartree or mean-field approach, and assume that the wave function is a symmetrized product of single-particle wave functions.
In this work, we study the ground state properties of a system of
N harmonically trapped bosons of mass
m interacting with two-body contact interactions, from small to large scattering lengths. This is accomplished in a hyperspherical coordinate system that is flexible enough to describe both the overall scale of the gas and two-body correlations. By adapting the lowest-order constrained variational (LOCV) method, we are able to semi-quantitatively attain Bose-Einstein condensate ground state energies even for gases with infinite scattering length. In the large particle number limit, our method provides analytical estimates for the energy per particle
E0/Napprox2.5N1/3hbaromega and two-body contact
C2/Napprox16N1/6sqrtmomega/hbar for a Bose gas on resonance, where
omega is the trap frequency. Further, by considering only two-body correlations, we note that a sudden quench from small to large scattering lengths leads to out-of-equilibrium resonant BEC. As an alternative, we propose a two-step scheme that involves an intermediate scattering length, between
0 and
infty, which serves to maximize the transfer probability of
N bosons in a harmonic trap with frequency
omega to the resonant state. We find that the intermediate scattering length should be
aapprox3.16N−2/3sqrthbar/(momega), and that it produces an optimum transition probability of
1.03N−1/6.
We apply a hyperspherical formulation to a trapped Bose-Einstein condensate with dipolar and contact interactions. Central to this approach is a general correspondence between
K-harmonic hyperspherical methods and a suitable Gaussian ansatz to the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, regardless of the form of the interparticle potential. This correspondence allows one to obtain hyperspherical potential energies for a wide variety of physical problems. In the case of the dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate, this motivates the inclusion of a beyond-mean-field term within the hyperspherical picture, which allows us to describe the energies and wave functions of excitations of self-bound dipolar droplets outside the mean-field limit.
We assume the macroscopic wave function of a Bose-Einstein condensate as a superposition of Gaussian wave packets, with time-dependent complex width parameters, insert it into the mean-field energy functional corresponding to the Gross-Pitaevskii equation (GPE) and apply the time-dependent variational principle. In this way the GPE is mapped onto a system of coupled equations of motion for the complex width parameters, which can be analyzed using the methods of nonlinear dynamics. We perform a stability analysis of the fixed points of the nonlinear system, and demonstrate that the eigenvalues of the Jacobian reproduce the low-lying quantum mechanical Bogoliubov excitation spectrum of a condensate in an axisymmetric trap.