A perturbation method is developed for calculating the oscillating frequencies of collective modes of trapped superfluid Fermi gases from Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superfluid to Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC). Based on the complete and orthogonal eigenfunction set obtained recently and a series expansion of the equation of state beyond the mean-field approximation, the corrections of eigenfrequencies and eigenfunctions of all collective modes are given systematically, which are valid for various superfluid regimes in the BCS-BEC crossover beyond the mean-field approximation. Expressions of frequency correction of the collective modes for both spherical and axial symmetric traps excited near the BCS, BEC, and unitarity limits are provided explicitly, and their dependence on interatomic interaction strength and anisotropic trapping parameter is also discussed in detail.
So far the theory of Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) of polar molecules was based on an ad hoc generalization of equations for spherical atoms. Here I adopt a rigorous pseudo-potential approach to low-energy dipolar interactions and derive a non-linear mean-field Schrodinger equation for a harmonically-trapped condensate. I show that, effectively, the dipolar interactions alter molecular mass. The resulting effective mass is anisotropic: to the leading order the mass is altered only for the motion along the polarizing field. For a typical BEC of spin-polarized magnetically-interacting alkali-metal atoms the effective atomic mass is reduced by 10% from its bare value. For a BEC of polar molecules the mass may be reduced by a factor of a 1,000.
We present semianalytical many-body results for energies and excitation frequencies for an inhomogeneous Bose-Einstein condensate over a wide range of atom numbers
N for both small
s-wave scattering lengths, typical of most laboratory experiments, and large scattering lengths, achieved by tuning through a Feshbach resonance. Our dimensional perturbation treatment includes two-body correlations at all orders and yields analytical results through first order by taking advantage of the high degree of symmetry of the condensate at the zeroth-order limit. Because
N remains a parameter in our analytical results, the challenge of calculating energies and excitation frequencies does not rise with the number of condensate atoms. In this proof-of-concept paper the atoms are confined in a spherical trap and are treated as hard spheres. Our many-body calculations compare well to Gross-Pitaevskii results in the weakly interacting regime and depart from the mean-field approximation as the density approaches the strongly interacting regime. The excitation frequencies provide a particularly sensitive test of beyond-mean-field corrections. For example, for
N=2000 atoms and an experimentally realized large scattering length of $a=0.433{a}_{ho}\phantom{\rule{0.3em}{0ex}}({a}_{ho}=\sqrt{\ensuremath{\hbar}∕m{\ensuremath{\omega}}_{ho}})$ we predict a
75 shift from the mean-field breathing mode frequency.