The dynamics of collapsing Bose-Einstein condensates.

This project aims to study the behavior of a cloud of Rubidium-85 atoms under an attractive interaction potential when used to create a Bose-Einstein condensate. Efforts to describe the dynamics of an attractive condensate using only the Gross-Pitaevskii equation have been unable to describe all of the features of such a system, and so the mathematical approach used is a perturbative method of corrections to the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. A system of analytical equations to describe a condensate is derived herein, which is then arranged into a form suitable for numerical solution. The actual calculation is not performed, but details of the computational procedure are provided, as well as an analysis of the difficulties inherent in the calculation