Session KP01 - Poster Session III.
POSTER session, Tuesday afternoon, March 23
Exhibit Hall, GWCC
We present a perturbation solution of a model Bose-Einstein Hamiltonian derived by Bohn, Esry and Greene(J.L. Bohn, B.D. Esry, and C.H. Greene, Phys. Rev. A 58), 584 (1998).. In our solution we use 1/N as the perturbation parameter, where N is the number of particles in the condensate. Ground and excited state energies are reported for parameters approximating the J.I.L.A. ^87Rb experiments(M.H. Anderson, J.R. Ensher, M.R. Mathews, C.E. Wieman, and E.A. Cornell, Science 269), 198(1995).. We predict the critical number of atoms with negative scattering lengths that can be trapped using the effective trap frequency of the first-order equation. This effective trap frequency folds in interactions between the external trap and the interatomic term. The N\rightarrow\infty perturbation limit, which retains a single term beyond the conventional Thomas-Fermi limit, gives ground state energies that agree to three digits with converged results, thus providing a much improved limit for large N.