The density of states of a Bose-condensed gas confined in a harmonic trap is investigated. The predictions of Bogoliubov theory are compared with those of Hartree-Fock theory and of the hydrodynamic model. We show that the Hartree-Fock scheme provides an excellent description of the excitation spectrum in a wide range of energy, revealing a major role played by single-particle excitations in these confined systems. The crossover from the hydrodynamic regime, holding at low energies, to the independent-particle regime is explicitly explored by studying the frequency of the surface mode as a function of their angular momentum. The applicability of the semiclassical approximation for the excited states is also discussed. We show that the semiclassical approach provides simple and accurate formulas for the density of states and the quantum depletion of the condensate.

We present a study of binary mixtures of Bose-Einstein condensates confined in a double-well potential within the framework of the mean field Gross-Pitaevskii equation. We reexamine both the single component and the binary mixture cases for such a potential, and we investigate in which situations a simpler two-mode approach leads to an accurate description of their dynamics. We also estimate the validity of the most usual dimensionality reductions used to solve the Gross-Pitaevskii equations. To this end, we compare both the semi-analytical two-mode approaches and the numerical simulations of the 1D reductions with the full 3D numerical solutions of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. Our analysis provides a guide to clarify the validity of several simplified models that describe mean field non-linear dynamics, using an experimentally feasible binary mixture of an F = 1 spinor condensate with two of its Zeeman manifolds populated, m = ±1.

We investigate the dynamics of a F = 1 spinor Bose-Einstein condensate of 87 Rb atoms confined in a quasi-one-dimensional trap both at zero and at finite temperature. At zero temperature, we observe coherent oscillations between populations of the various spin components and the formation of multiple domains in the condensate. We study also finite temperature effects in the spin dynamics taking into account the phase fluctuations in the Bogoliubov-de Gennes framework. At finite T, despite complex multidomain formation in the condensate, population equipartition occurs. The length scale of these spin domains seems to be determined intrinsically by nonlinear interactions.

Interaction between collective monopole oscillations of a trapped Bose-Einstein condensate and thermal excitations is investigated by means of perturbation theory. We assume spherical symmetry to calculate the matrix elements by solving the linearized Gross-Pitaevskii equations. We use them to study the resonances of the condensate induced by temperature when an external perturbation of the trapping frequency is applied and to calculate the Landau damping of the oscillations.

We present full three-dimensional numerical calculations of single vortex states in rotating dipolar condensates. We consider a Bose-Einstein condensate of 52 Cr atoms with dipole-dipole and swave contact interactions confined in an axially symmetric harmonic trap. We obtain the vortex states by numerically solving the Gross-Pitaevskii equation in the rotating frame with no further approximations. We investigate the properties of a single vortex and calculate the critical angular velocity for different values of the s-wave scattering length. We show that, whereas the standard variational approach breaks down in the limit of pure dipolar interactions, exact solutions of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation can be obtained for values of the s-wave scattering length down to zero. The energy barrier for the nucleation of a vortex is calculated as a function of the vortex displacement from the rotation axis for different values of the angular velocity of the rotating trap.