Behavior of trapped ultracold dilute Bose gases at large scattering length near a Feshbach resonance

Abstract

We calculate the ground-state energy and the collective excitation frequency of trapped bosons at large scattering length interacting via the realistic two-body van der Waals potential. Our many-body method keeps two-body correlations produced by all interacting pairs. When the scattering length is small compared to the trap size and the number of bosons in the trap is of the order of a few thousands, the mean-field results are in good agreement with the many-body results. However for large particle numbers, even when the condensate is sufficiently dilute, the interatomic correlation comes into the picture. When the scattering length is quite large near the Feshbach resonance, the Bose gas becomes highly correlated. The many-body results are close to the Gross-Pitaevskii results for a small number of bosons, however, large deviations are noted in the large particle limit. We also calculate the lowest collective excitation and the interaction energy for large scattering lengths. The monopole excitation frequency exhibits a pronounced dependence on the scattering length. We also observe a universal behavior for the interaction energy at the limit of large scattering length.