The kinetic and interaction energies of a trapped Bose gas: Beyond the mean field

A. Yu. Cherny, A. A. Shanenko

Published 2001-05-17, updated 2001-11-30Version 2

The kinetic and interaction energies of a three-dimensional dilute ground-state Bose gas confined in a trap are calculated beyond a mean-field treatment. They are found to depend on the pairwise interaction trough two characteristic lengths: the first, a, is the well-known scattering length and the second, b, is related to the latter by b=a-\lambda d a/d\lambda with \lambda being the coupling constant. Numerical estimations show that the pairwise interaction energy of a dilute gas of alkali atoms in a trap is negative (in spite of the positive scattering length); its absolute value is found by about the order of magnitude larger than that of the mean-field interaction energy that corresponds to the last term in the Gross-Pitaevskii functional.