Energy eigenfunctions of the 1D Gross-Pitaevskii equation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new algorithm for computing excited states of the 1D Gross-Pitaevskii equation, especially in regimes of strong nonlinearity, and demonstrates its effectiveness through numerical results and comparisons with analytical solutions.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel algorithm capable of accurately calculating excited states in strongly nonlinear Gross-Pitaevskii equations, surpassing limitations of previous methods.

Findings

The algorithm successfully computes energy eigenstates for three different potentials.

Numerical solutions agree with known analytical solutions, validating the method.

The approach is applicable to regimes of strong nonlinearity in Bose-Einstein condensates.

Abstract

We developed a new and powerful algorithm by which numerical solutions for excited states in a gravito optical surface trap have been obtained. They represent solutions in the regime of strong nonlinearities of the Gross--Pitaevskii equation. In this context we also shortly review several approaches which allow, in principle, for calculating excited state solutions. It turns out that without modifications these are not applicable to strongly nonlinear Gross-Pitaevskii equations. The importance of studying excited states of Bose-Einstein condensates is also underlined by a recent experiment of B\"ucker et al in which vibrational state inversion of a Bose-Einstein condensate has been achieved by transferring the entire population of the condensate to the first excited state. Here, we focus on demonstrating the applicability of our algorithm for three different potentials by means of numerical results for the energy eigenstates and eigenvalues of the 1D Grosss-Pitaevskii-equation. We compare the numerically found solutions and find out that they completely agree with the case of known analytical solutions.