Barnali Chakrabartti | University of Calcutta - Índia

Abstract

The theoretical investigation of Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) has been a topic of increasing interest since the achievement of first experiment in supercooled trapped alkali atoms. The ability to solve this many-body problem with such a large number of interacting bosons in the trap is really a challenging problem. The main difficulty comes in handling too may degrees of freedom arising from too many interacting pairs. The existing standard few-body methods like Faddeev and hyperspherical harmonics expansion method are applicable only for a few atoms in the trap. On the other hand, quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods like diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC) and variational Monte Carlo (VMC) although givING quite accurate results, keeping all possible interatomic correlations, present enormous computational difficulties with increasing number of particles. Very recently, Chakrabarti and Das have proposed one alternative theoretical approach referred to as the correlated potential harmonics expansion method (CPHEM), based on the method first proposed by Fabre for nuclear systems. Applications of this method have been made in collaboration as a consequence of a visit of Prof. Das, sponsored by FAPESP. After we have been collaborating and in this project we plan studying the stability and structure of diffuse 4He and 87Rb clusters atomic clusters. (AU)