Highly anisotropic Bose-Einstein condensates: crossover to lower dimensionality

Abstract

We develop a simple analytical model based on a variational method to explain the properties of trapped cylindrically symmetric Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) of varying degrees of anisotropy well into regimes of effective one dimension (1D) and effective two dimension (2D). Our results are accurate in regimes where the Thomas-Fermi approximation breaks down and they are shown to be in agreement with recent experimental data.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures; significantly more new material added; title and author-list changed due to changes in conten