Energy eigenfunctions of the 1D Gross–Pitaevskii equation Original Research Article

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 briefly 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 Bücker 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 Gross–Pitaevskii-equation. We compare the numerically found solutions and find out that they completely agree with the case of known analytical solutions.