We calculate the pair correlation function of an interacting Bose gas in a harmonic trap directly via Path Integral Quantum Monte Carlo simulation for various temperatures and compare the numerical result with simple approximative treatments. Around the critical temperature of Bose-Einstein condensation, a description based on the Hartree-Fock approximation is found to be accurate. At low temperatures the Hartree-Fock approach fails and we use a local density approximation based on the Bogoliubov description for a homogeneous gas. This approximation agrees with the simulation results at low temperatures, where the contribution of the phonon-like modes affects the long range behavior of the correlation function. Further we discuss the relation between the pair correlation and quantities measured in recent experiments.
We study atom-atom correlations and relative number squeezing in the dissociation of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of molecular dimers made of either bosonic or fermionic atom pairs. Our treatment addresses the role of the spatial inhomogeneity of the molecular BEC on the strength of correlations in the short time limit. We obtain explicit analytic results for the density-density correlation functions in momentum space, and show that the correlation widths and the degree of relative number squeezing are determined merely by the shape of the molecular condensate.
We construct a variational wave function for inhomogeneous weakly interacting Bose--Einstein condensates beyond the mean-field approximation by incorporating
3/2-body correlations. From our numerical results calculated for a system trapped by a one-dimensional harmonic oscillator, the
3/2-body correlations give a contribution comparable to the mean- field energy toward lowering the ground-state energy.