Hydrodynamic excitations of Bose condensates in anisotropic traps

Abstract

The collective excitations of Bose condensates in anisotropic axially symmetric harmonic traps are investigated in the hydrodynamic and Thomas-Fermi limit. We identify an additional conserved quantity, besides the axial angular momentum and the total energy, and separate the wave equation in elliptic coordinates. The solution is reduced to the algebraic problem of diagonalizing finite dimensional matrices. The classical quasi-particle dynamics in the local density approximation for energies of the order of the chemical potential is shown to be chaotic.