Semiclassical Corrections to the Oscillation Frequencies of a Trapped Bose-Einstein Condensate

The oscillation frequencies of collective excitations of a trapped Bose-Einstein condensate, when calculated in the mean-field approximation and in the Thomas-Fermi limit, are independent of the scattering length a . We calculate the leading corrections to the frequencies from quantum fluctuations around the mean field. The semiclassical correction is proportional to N1/5a6/5 , where N is the number of atoms in the condensate. The correction is positive semidefinite and is zero for surface modes whose eigenfunctions have a vanishing Laplacian. The shift in the frequency of the lowest quadrupole mode for an axially symmetric trap is large enough that it should be measurable in future experiments. copyright 1999 The American Physical Society