In this paper, we study dynamics of the ground state and central vortex states in Bose–Einstein condensation (BEC) analytically and numerically. We show how to define the energy of the Thomas–Fermi (TF) approximation, prove that the ground state is a global minimizer of the energy functional over the unit sphere and all excited states are saddle points in linear case, derive a second-order ordinary differential equation (ODE) which shows that time-evolution of the condensate width is a periodic function with/without a perturbation by using the variance identity, prove that the angular momentum expectation is conserved in two dimensions (2D) with a radial symmetric trap and 3D with a cylindrical symmetric trap for any initial data, and study numerically stability of central vortex states as well as interaction between a few central vortices with winding numbers ±1 by a fourth-order time-splitting sine-pseudospectral (TSSP) method. The merit of the numerical method is that it is explicit, unconditionally stable, time reversible and time transverse invariant. Moreover, it conserves the position density, performs spectral accuracy for spatial derivatives and fourth-order accuracy for time derivative, and possesses "optimal" spatial/temporal resolution in the semiclassical regime. Finally we find numerically the critical angular frequency for single vortex cycling from the ground state under a far-blue detuned Gaussian laser stirrer in strong repulsive interaction regime and compare our numerical results with those in the literatures.
We propose and analyze a new numerical method for computing the ground state of the modified Gross--Pitaevskii equation for modeling the Bose--Einstein condensate with a higher order interaction by adapting the density function formulation and the accelerated projected gradient method. By reformulating the energy functional E(ϕ) with ϕ, the wave function, in terms of the density ρ=∣ϕ∣2, the original nonconvex minimization problem for defining the ground state is then reformulated to a convex minimization problem. In order to overcome the semismoothness of the function ρ in the kinetic energy part, a regularization is introduced with a small parameter 0<ε≪1. Convergence of the regularization is established when ε→0. The regularized convex optimization problem is discretized by the second order finite difference method. The convergence rates in terms of the density and energy of the discretization are established. The accelerated projected gradient method is adapted for solving the discretized optimization problem. Numerical results are reported to demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed numerical method. Our results show that the proposed method is much more efficient than the existing methods in the literature, especially in the strong interaction regime.