Quantitative Derivation of the Gross-Pitaevskii Equation

Starting from first-principle many-body quantum dynamics, we show that the dynamics of Bose-Einstein condensates can be approximated by the time-dependent nonlinear Gross-Pitaevskii equation, giving a bound on the rate of the convergence. Initial data are constructed on the bosonic Fock space applying an appropriate Bogoliubov transformation on a coherent state with expected number of particles N. The Bogoliubov transformation plays a crucial role; it produces the correct microscopic correlations among the particles. Our analysis shows that, on the level of the one-particle reduced density, the form of the initial data is preserved by the many-body evolution, up to a small error that vanishes as N-1/2 in the limit of large N.