2001/01/25 by A. Fabrocini, A. Polls
Physics and Astronomy · #Atomic and Subatomic Physics Research #Bose gas #Bose–Einstein condensate #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Environmental science #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Quantum, superfluid, helium dynamics #cond-mat.soft
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreva.64.063610
4 LaTeX pages, 2 figures
arxiv created 2001/01/25 · openalex publication_date 2001/11/16 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Bose-Einstein condensates of 10485Rb atoms in a cylindrical trap are studied using a recently proposed approach based on a local-density approximation. Since the existence of a Feshbach resonance allows for widely tuning the scattering length of the atoms, values of the peak gas parameter xpk of the order of 10^\ensuremath-2 may be attained and the standard analysis based on Gross-Pitaevskii and/or Thomas-Fermi equations may result in being questionable. Energy functionals derived from the correlated basis functions theory and the low-density expansion for a homogeneous hard-spheres gas are used to estimate corrections to the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. The two functionals give similar results, both showing large differences with respect to the Thomas-Fermi and Gross-Pitaevskii ones. The column densities at z=0 may differ by as much as \ensuremath∼30% and the half maximum radius by \ensuremath∼20%. The scattering lengths estimated by fitting the half maximum radius may differ by \ensuremath∼40% from those given by a Thomas-Fermi-based analysis of the experimental data.