A numerical approach to the ground and excited states of a Bose-Einstein condensed gas confined in a completely anisotropic trap

Abstract

The ground and excited states of a weakly interacting and dilute Bose-Einstein condensed gas, confined in a completely anisotropic harmonic oscillator potential, are determined at zero temperature within the Bogoliubov approximation. The numerical calculations employ a computationally efficient procedure based on a discrete variable representation (DVR) of the Hamiltonian. The DVR is efficient for problems where the interaction potential may be expressed as a local function of interparticle coordinates. In order to address condensates that are both very large (millions of atoms) and fully anisotropic, the ground state is found using a self-consistent field approach. Experience has demonstrated, however, that standard iterative techniques applied to the solution of the non-linear partial differential equation for the condensate are non-convergent. This limitation is overcome using the method of direct inversion in the iterated subspace (DIIS). In addition, the sparse structure of the DVR enables the efficient application of iterative techniques such as the Davidson and/or Lanczos methods, to extract the eigenvalues of physical interest. The results are compared with recent experimental data obtained for Bose-Einstein condensed alkali metal vapors confined in magnetic traps.