Some aspects of Bose Einstein condensation: a theoretical study

Shorttitle: The first experimental achievement of Bose Einstein condensation (BEC) in dilute alkali gases in 1995 has developed a renewed interest both theoretical and experimental. Lot of work has already been done over the last decade to study the different aspects of this condensation, mainly based on mean-field theories, hyperspherical approaches and quantum Monte Carlo methods. This thesis work presents an approximate many-body approach to investigate mainly the static (ground state) properties of the condensate, incorporating realistic inter-atomic interactions. Potential harmonic expansion method (PHEM), which includes two-body correlations only and disregards three or higher body correlations, has been adopted to analyze this condensate. This is ideally suited for BEC, which is required to be extremely dilute for its experimental realization. This treatment and analysis should be useful for the physics community especially working with weakly interacting ultra cold atoms, bosons and fermions as well.