Condensate fraction and critical temperature of a trapped interacting Bose gas

By using a mean-field approach, based on the Popov approximation, we calculate the temperature dependence of the condensate fraction of an interacting Bose gas of N atoms confined in an anisotropic harmonic trap. For systems interacting with repulsive forces we find a significant decrease of the condensate fraction and of the critical temperature with respect to the predictions of the noninteracting model with the same value of N. An analytic result for the shift of the critical temperature holding to first order in the scattering length is also derived. © 1996 The American Physical Society.