Beyond the Gross-Pitaevskii approximation: Local density versus correlated basis approach for trapped bosons

We study the ground state of a system of Bose hard spheres trapped in an isotropic harmonic potential to investigate the effect of the interatomic correlations and the accuracy of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. We compare a local-density approximation, based on the energy functional derived from the low-density expansion of the energy of the uniform hard-sphere gas, and a correlated wave-function approach, which explicitly introduces the correlations induced by the potential. Both higher-order terms in the low-density expansion, beyond Gross-Pitaevskii, and explicit dynamical correlations have effects of the order of percent when the number of trapped particles becomes similar to that attained in recent experiments $(N\ensuremath{\sim}{10}^{7}).$