Test of a Jastrow-type Wavefunction for a Trapped Few-body System in One Dimension

For a system with interacting quantum mechanical particles in a one-dimensional harmonic oscillator, a trial wavefunction with simple structure based on the solution of the corresponding two-particle system is suggested and tested numerically. With the inclusion of a scaling parameter for the distance between particles, at least for the very small systems tested here the ansatz gives a very good estimate of the ground state energy, with the error being of the order of ∼1 % of the gap to the first excited state. (author)