The material presented here consists of lecture notes written for a five two-hour sections course given during the 2004 edition of the Brazilian School on Statistical Mechanics.The topics covered are 1.Bose-Einstein condensation of trapped ideal gases; 2. Effective two-body interactions and exact results in the Gross-Pitaevski limit; 3. Atomic structure effects, including "Feshbach resonances" and hybrid condensates; 4. Elementary excitations in the Bogoliubov approximation and beyond; and 5. Splitt traps, interference phenomena and condensate arrays.
About seven decades ago Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein predicted that a gas of noninteracting integer-spin particles would condense into a macroscopic quantum state when cooled below a critical temperature. Of course Bose–Einstein condensation (BEC) has long since been seen in superfluid He4 and superconductors, but the condensing systems in these examples are far from being noninteracting gases; relatively strong interactions between the condensing particles greatly complicate the theoretical analysis and the experimental behavior. For more than 15 years groups have been cooling and compressing clouds of atoms on a quest to produce and observe a Bose–Einstein condensate in a nearideal gas. They pushed their devices to the limit, seeking to traverse 15 orders of magnitude of phase-space density, and as each technique proved insufficient they developed ingenious variations to create ever colder and denser states.