The Condensate Wave Function of a Trapped Atomic Gas

We discuss various properties of the ground state of a Bose-condensed dilute gas confined by an external potential. We devote particular attention to the role played by the interaction in determining the kinetic energy of the system and the aspect ratio of the velocity distribution. The structure of the wave function near the classical turning point is discussed and the drawback of the Thomas-Fermi approximation is explicitly pointed out. We consider also states with quantized vorticity and calculate the critical angular velocity for the production of vortices. The presence of vortex states is found to increases the stability of the condensate in the case of attractive interactions.